Last week, the UK announced it greatest ever military support package for Ukraine. TThe bill takes the UK’s total support for this financial year to £3bn — not quite the $50bn recently pledged by the US, but still significant.
But while most of those funds will be spent on very traditional military hardware, a new technology initiative launched last weekend aimed to bolster Ukraine’s asymmetric warfare capabilities against Russia. Actually, the London Defense Tech Hackathon was the first event to bring together some of the UK’s brightest minds in technology, venture capital and national security in a military setting. The idea was to hack ideas to both help Ukraine and create a much more porous layer between the fast-paced tech worlds of politics and the very different world of the military.
Compiled by Alex Fitzgerald of Skyral and Richard Pass of Future Forcesthe two were joined by co-organizers who included the Honorable Artillery Company, Defense of Apollo, Lambda automatically and D3 VC among others.
The event brought together developers with expertise in both hardware and software to drive innovation in defense, national security and deep technology. A key focus was on drones and their battlefield applications, both the hardware and electronics required to fly to their targets and anti-drone systems.
As most observers of the war have pointed out, this war has taken on a whole new dimension compared to previous wars. Today, drones and electronic countermeasures are the order of the day as Ukraine has sought to counter Russia, a much larger aggressor, with asymmetric methods.
Fitzgerald said to me, “There there are three groups of people who come to these events. There are the builders, the investors and the military. I think for everyone, it’s trying to get their colleagues to think more about defense technology as an option to either build or invest.”
He explained that there were two main paths of work: electronic warfare and drone or aerial systems: “There is an acronym that I learned from someone smarter than me, which is that the future of defense technologies is small, cheap and unmanned.”
He explained that a main aim was to get people who were not traditionally involved in defense to either build or invest in defence: “We have people like the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund. So yes, it’s a combination of people who are already investing in defense or who haven’t thought about investing in the past.”
He chose the hackathon format because “the focus is on getting things done. Get real builders, so we’re not just talking about building, because that’s really where most of the innovation happens.”
One of the inspirations for the event was the recent El Segundo, California, defense technology hackathon in February of this year.
“I think the key with military technology is to make it as easy to use and as powerful as some of the consumer technology that’s been built,” Fitzgerald said. “There’s the classic line, ‘There’s more AI in a Snapchat snap than there. are often some more modern military systems.’
The event was also attended by Catarina Buchatskiy, representative Defense of Apollo. As the engineers looked at the cameras, Starlinks and drones, he told me, “Defense technology is a tough industry. And it’s a tough market to break into, for obvious reasons. We’ve found Hackathons to be an extremely exciting way to get people involved because defense technology can seem like a huge black box of contracts that take 10 years and technologies that are built [are often] hidden from public view. In a hackathon, you have 24 hours. Make something really cool.”
The interceptor was done
He said the company has had “a lot of success” with it El Segundo Event.
“We just realized that if people think it’s something that’s accessible to them [and] they can do something quickly and have an impact, they want to be involved,” he told me.
Buchatskiy, who is Ukrainian, also spoke strongly about Ukraine: “These are very real things for me. When I say I need a drone detector, it’s because I’m looking at one outside my window that we didn’t spot in time and it’s going to kill my neighbor. This is the reality we face.”
He added that it’s important for hackathon participants to know “that they’re building for someone and this could really save my family’s life.”
Despite the controversy surrounding defense technology in some quarters, he added, “To be involved in technology is to be interested in a better future. And I really, really can’t think of a more interesting and better future than a safe one where we can guarantee peace.”
NATO, in the form of the NATO Investment Fund, a fund with one billion euros to invest in defense technology over the next few years, was also represented.
Fund partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky told me the fund was created to support startups “that enhance our collective defense security and resilience. We invest in deep dual-use technology, but the fund was created before the war in Ukraine. The conflict has now greatly affected our investment thesis and we want to invest in defense technologies that can make Europe safer and more secure.”
But why was NATO sponsoring a hackathon?
“I think defense technology is new to a lot of founders and a lot of developers,” Schneider-Sikorsky said. “It’s not as easy for them to understand the problem statements and the challenges and also get access to the end users.”
He said the hackathon format lends itself particularly well to this: “Normally, for many founders, it would have taken months, if not years, to get in touch with the right people in the defense ministries, and many of them are here today. So we hope it will speed things up significantly.”
Another investor present, Alex Flamant from HCVC, told me: “There was a need for people in Europe to invest in proper defense technologies. From the investors’ point of view it appeared that there are restrictions on the investment of some investors. One of the goals of this is to demystify a lot of that to new builders and really get the world more aligned with the great mission that we all have.”
The machine learning expert was there to focus on drone detection: “This is in our knowledge of machine vision and object detection. Ukraine is fighting for the whole of Europe right now and obviously the UK is vital to that. It’s important to ally with them and use what we have to help.”
The hackthon came at a time of heightened tension around the use of technologies in defense.
Google recently fired 28 employees after their sit-in protest over the controversial Project Nimbus contract with Israel, for example.
However, defense is clearly rising on the technology agenda.
Anduril recently moved ahead of a Pentagon program to develop unmanned combat aircraft, and more generally, as we learned last year, venture capital is opening the portals for defense technology.
And in the UK, there is a lot of talk about how high-powered lasers could be among the next wave of weapons. The DragonFire gun is said to be accurate enough to hit a £1 coin from a kilometer away, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and cost just $15 to fire.
The projects that will emerge from the hackathon it may not have been quite as sci-fi, but it was pretty close. How about a “High Speed Interceptor to shoot down the Orlan Drones’? And at least they are likely to be developed much sooner than a laser weapon.
