European Defense Tech Hackathon - Brussels

Time to Accelerate European Defense Innovation 🚀 Join us and 100+ hackers from across Europe and beyond for the European Defense Tech Hackathon on March 13-15, 2026, in Brussels, Belgium—right after the EDF Info Days and in parallel to BEDEX 🦾 Wanna come as a visitor? Join our EDTH Community here: https://community.eurodefense.tech/ Connect with fellow defense innovators, meet potential co-founders, and build projects with real-world impact that could save lives. We’ll bring challenges rooted in pressing defense and security problems, and you’re welcome to bring your own ideas. Throughout the event, you’ll get hands-on guidance from seasoned mentors—and after the hackathon, we’ll help you take your project closer to real-world deployment 🚀 Challenges We'll focus on solving urgent security challenges, including countering Shahed and fiber-optic drones, GNSS-denied localization, low-cost sensing and tracking, secure identification, mesh networking, and battle damage assessment. Work on reducing operator exposure, address edge health monitoring, and full-spectrum data fusion for defense and civil protection—and we'll also include a policy-focused challenge track. Goals 1) Solve urgent defense and security challenges: Each hackathon features a fresh set of challenges sourced directly from frontline partners in Ukraine, the UK, and across the EU—driven by real needs, not theory. 2) Launch new careers and companies: Whether you're breaking into the defense sector or building your own product and company, we connect you with jobs, funding, and pathways toward real-world deployment. 3) Strengthen Europe through defense innovation: Here is where Europe's top talent meets the most pressing threats. By building and shipping, we demonstrate what a fast, capable, and resilient European defense ecosystem looks like. Visitors If you’re curious about the outcomes and what the teams have built, you can join the Demo Day on Sunday as an EDTH Community visitor by selecting a Community Visitor ticket. Not yet part of the EDTH Community? Get free access to all EDTH Community events for one year, including hackathon demo days, webinars, networking sessions, and our flagship New Defense Summit Sign up to become a member here: https://community.eurodefense.tech/ Agenda Friday, March 13, 2026 Pre-Hackathon Meetup https://luma.com/edth-meetup-brussels-2026 Please also sign up for the meetup—it will be at a separate venue 16:00 - Doors open, Networking 16:30 - Welcome by Organizers, 1-2 Talks 17:30 - Open-ended Networking 19:00 - End of meetup Saturday, March 14, 2026 08:00 - Doors open, Start of Hacking 09:00 - Welcome, Introduction to Challenges and Mentors 10:00 - Start of Hacking Hacking all day and overnight Sunday, March 15, 2026 10:00 - Testing of Presentations 12:00 - End of Hacking Demo Day (Open to Visitors) 13:00 - Pitches of the winning teams 15:00 - Award Ceremony 15:30 - After-party & Networking If you want to become a partner, write to maria@eurodefense.tech