For the second consecutive year, GATE Institute supports start-ups in the challenges of the dual-purpose NATO innovation accelerator DIANA. In 2024, they are five: Energy and Power, Data and Information Security, Sensing and Surveillance, Human Health and Performance and Critical Infrastructure and Logistics, challenges further enriched by three cross-cutting themes: Space, Resilience, and Sustainability.
Each company will receive seed funding of €100,000 and guidance, mentoring, and access to renowned testing centres such as the GATE Institute. The application deadline is August 9, 2024, at *protected email*.
Innovations in these areas strengthen defence and security and offer significant civilian applications, contributing to broader societal benefits such as improved energy efficiency, better health monitoring and more sustainable infrastructure.
As a NATO test centre, GATE Institute’s expertise covers all five new DIANA challenges and can help innovators.
“Dual-use technologies are a natural interface between the defence industry and emerging innovators and entrepreneurs. Often, startups develop technologies that can be applied relatively easily to security without their original design or investment even suggesting this. All companies need to realize the full potential of their developments, is to tap into a vibrant ecosystem of security and defence experts and investors. DIANA is such an ecosystem, and GATE is its entry point,” explains the coordinator of GATE’s participation in NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator (DIANA) Borislav Bankov.
The institute’s focus is on testing technologies related to the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI).
“The Bulgarian companies that applied for the DIANA pilot program in 2023 demonstrated the extraordinary potential of our innovative industry. They proposed various ideas in all priority areas of DIANA, and the result was not long in coming: in terms of success in DIANA, Bulgaria ranked next to countries such as Germany,” summarizes Borislav Bankov.