Open Call: Diana Challenge Programme 2026

DIANA is a programme that uses ‘challenges’ to identify emerging and disruptive technologies which can fulfil capability needs of the Alliance. Challenges are therefore based on the priority technology areas of NATO, Allied nations, the latest trends in emerging and disruptive technologies, and market potential.

DIANA issues its challenges publicly through Challenge Calls. Innovators can submit proposals in response to these challenges. Companies that are competitively selected based on their proposed solutions will be invited to join the DIANA Challenge Programme, signing a framework agreement to become “DIANA innovators” and continue iterating the solution they proposed in response to the challenge.

Challenges

• Energy and Power:
  • The energy sector is grappling with increasing demand, ageing infrastructure, environmental concerns, and security vulnerabilities. The need for location-independent on-demand power with high reliability and resilience represents a fundamental enabler for the Alliance across a multitude of civilian and military applications. This is further compounded by the anticipated power demands of machine learning and electrified mobility. The Alliance seeks dual-use solutions that ensure reliable power, resilience against threats, and adaptability to evolving conditions.
• Advanced Communication Technologies:
  • State-of-the-art communication technologies provide data sharing networks with unprecedented levels of bandwidth, latency and availability. Further performance gains will be necessary to enable advancing technologies such as autonomous networks and telemedicine. In both civilian and military contexts, communication networks are increasingly prone to interference, jamming, cyberattack and physical sabotage. Next generation communications technologies must therefore combine high levels of performance with resilience, redundancy and adaptability in both civilian and military applications. The Alliance seeks dual-use solutions enhancing the resilience and effectiveness of next generation communications technologies for the robust and rapid exchange of data across decentralised computing, sensing and communications networks.
• Contested Electromagnetic Environments:
  • Sensing and surveillance technologies often operate in contested and congested electromagnetic environments, where the spectrum bandwidth is limited due to unintentional interference by commercial and industrial use or due to intentional jamming by hostile actors. Other devices using the electromagnetic spectrum, such as radar or space-based navigation systems, may also be subject to interference, jamming and spoofing, leading to disablement or performance degradation. This interference can be countered using novel sensor technologies which are inherently robust against electromagnetic noise, through the accurate measurement and intelligent management of the electromagnetic spectrum or using alternate sensing systems. These technologies are equally applicable in civilian and military environments. The Alliance seeks dual-use sensing, navigation, data link, spectrum analysis and management solutions that ensure operational robustness and resilience in electromagnetic contested and congested environments.
• Human Resilience & Biotechnology:
  •  In the 21st century, the intersection of life sciences and biotechnology has led to transformative advancements in personalised medicine and health, food security, biomanufacturing, and combating disease. Still, boosting human survival and health remain challenging, especially during war or natural disasters. In this context, establishing a continuum of care for military personnel is key to allied medical offset strategy. Civilian and military medical units must be resilient, agile, and equipped with advanced biotechnology and medical technologies, for example for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive (“CBRNE”) response and trauma care. This challenge aims to enhance and protect human health and performance, equipping humans to handle extreme physical and mental demands. The Alliance seeks cutting-edge biomedical, biotechnology, bioengineered, synthetic and computational dual-use solutions to protect the wellbeing and security of NATO citizens and military personnel.
• Operations in Extreme Environments:
  • The Arctic and other extreme environments present unique challenges for remote communities, research, natural resources exploration and defence operations. Great distances, cold, heat, humidity, dust, radiation, corrosive environments, rugged terrain and lack of infrastructure significantly limit the effectiveness of standard personnel training, equipment, and systems. The Arctic in particular presents many of these obstacles in a multi-domain theatre of increasing strategic relevance. The Alliance seeks dual-use technologies and innovative solutions to ensure effective and safe operations in the planet’s most challenging environments.
• Maritime Operations:
  • Military and civilian operations increasingly leverage complex groups of assets across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace, all requiring seamless command and control. The maritime environment particularly suffers unique challenges, operating in cold, wet, salty conditions, with congested shipping lanes and rapidly changing environmental conditions. To address these challenges, the Alliance seeks secure, integrated dual-use solutions to provide real-time situational awareness, aid decision-making and empower operations across vast maritime theatres.
• Resilient Space Operations:
  • Space is increasingly a key domain for both commercial and military activities. Access and monitoring of the space environment is crucial for Allies to protect assets from debris, energetic particles and radio emissions as well as anticipating and defeating adversary threats. Space situational awareness currently heavily leverages ground-based sensors like telescopes and radar, but surveillance from orbital sensors is an underdeveloped method of improving situational awareness. Furthermore, legacy charged particle and radio emissions models rely on limited historical data in a discrete number of orbital regimes. Just as air traffic management must account for weather events and radio spectrum use, space traffic management must also adapt to this dynamic landscape. Meanwhile, sustaining operations in an increasingly crowded space environment will require frequent manoeuvring to avoid predicted collisions, very rapid revisit rates to track manoeuvring targets, and on-orbit servicing to refuel for manoeuvres and repair damage sustained due to space weather.
• Critical Infrastructure & Logistics:
  • Critical infrastructure and logistics face significant challenges to resilience and adaptability in the face of evolving threats and demands. Additive manufacturing, metamaterials, and nanotechnology all offer promising solutions to these challenges, but often fall short due to limitations in scalability, material properties, and integration capabilities. Additive manufacturing struggles with slow production speeds and material limitations, metamaterials face hurdles in design, fabrication and characterisation, and nanotechnology encounters technical, safety, and regulatory challenges. Meanwhile each of these technologies requires a complex logistical chain to deliver the right materials to the right places at the right time. The Alliance seeks dual-use solutions that ensure resilient and adaptable critical infrastructure and logistics across all its operations and supply chains.
• Autonomy & Unmanned Systems:
  • Unmanned systems across air, land, sea, and undersea domains (“UAVs”, “UGVs”, “USVs”, and “UUVs”) have become increasingly prevalent in both Alliance operations and civilian applications. These platforms deliver transformative and rapidly advancing capabilities, unlocking a broad range of tactical and strategic opportunities. However, they also introduce a dynamic set of challenges, including new operational concepts, evolving training requirements, and complex sustainment needs. At the same time, there is a growing imperative to detect and counter adversarial unmanned systems. The Alliance is actively seeking innovative autonomous technologies and effective countermeasures to enhance protection against the full spectrum of unmanned systems (“UxS”).
• Data Assisted Decision Making:
  • Advances in sensors, communications and computation have led to a vast amount of data being collected throughout both civilian and military operations. However, due to the complexity of dynamic environments and diversity of sources, this data is frequently unfiltered and unstructured. Effective data fusion is therefore required for big data algorithms to extract meaningful insights and correlations. Digital modelling, simulation and prediction tools must utilise these diverse data to inform machine learning algorithms for effective automated decision making in dynamic environments. Integrating the derived information into a single interactive display, optimised to empower human situational awareness and decision making, is also challenging due to the inhomogeneity of sources and formats. From collection to user interpretation, maintaining the authenticity, traceability and veracity of data and information is critical for decision makers to meet their objectives. To address these challenges, the Alliance seeks integrated dual-use digital solutions to enable data assisted decision making.

Benefits

• A dual-use focus: learn how to prepare your business for the defence and security environment, understand the ways of working in defence and what it takes to scale in that domain, whilst simultaneously progressing your technology in the civilian market.
• Early exposure to customers: get early feedback from defence end-users and buyers across NATO to enable you to shape your solution to meet both military and civilian needs. Innovators get exposure to end-users and buyers throughout the programme, and may also receive invitations to attend military exercises.
• Support to secure your solution: learn how to safeguard your intellectual property and manage security risks.
• Opportunities to test your technology: access a network of around 180 specialised test centres across the Alliance, each with specific technology testing capabilities, to validate and refine your technologies in realistic, mission-relevant environments.
• Exposure to a transatlantic pool of investors: connect with a trusted, transatlantic pool of investors to fuel the growth of your company. Learn how to match public and private funding. Business development support: strengthen your core business skills – including pitching, upsizing, and engaging with procurement professionals – to support the long-term growth of your business and adoption of your solution by end-users.
• In addition to this support, innovators receive €100,000 of contractual funding, and may seek, through competitive processes, additional funds for testing, evaluation, validation & verification activities.
• The €100,000 of contractual funding is paid in full before the start of Accelerator Programme Phase 1 and is awarded to the company, not to individuals. It supports ongoing development of the proposed solution over the first six months and is also used to cover innovators’ travel costs for mandatory training sessions and events forming part of the DIANA Accelerator Programme.
• The contractual funding shall be also used to cover mandatory travel to assigned accelerator sites as well as global events, occurring up to one week per month of Phase 1. No additional funding will be provided to cover travel expenses beyond this allocation.
• Innovators who are successfully down-selected to Accelerator Programme Phase 2 may receive up to €300,000 in additional contractual funding to support a further six months of iteration of their solution.
• Phase 2 of the Accelerator Programme offers tailored support to a smaller group of innovators down-selected through a proposal process at the end of Phase 1.

Eligibility Criteria

• They encourage all eligible companies that think their technology could help solve one of the challenges to submit a proposal.
• Any incorporated company with its principal place of business in a NATO member nation that is controlled and majority owned by nationals of NATO member nations is eligible to submit a proposal. They recommend early-stage start-ups or small and medium-sized enterprises with limited experience in defence and security to apply, as these companies will be most suited to and benefit most from the programme.
• DIANA will accept collaborative proposals as long as all member companies meet the eligibility requirements; a single company must be listed as the lead for the purposes of communication during the submission process, as well as for contracting and reporting requirements, should the proposal be selected.
• DIANA seeks technology solutions at maturity levels typically between Technology Readiness Level (“TRL”) 4-7, but lower TRL solutions that could offer significant strategic impact and higher TRL solutions that could be adapted to defence and security applications will be considered.
• DIANA focuses on dual-use technologies, which by definition have applications in both civilian and defence and security settings. In other words, DIANA does not work on weaponry, munitions, or other technology only applicable to combat—this is the scope of other programmes and agencies. The focus on dual use is integral to DIANA, and part of what makes them unique.
• Companies that signed agreements with DIANA to be part of DIANA cohorts in previous years are not eligible to apply again. Companies that submitted to previous DIANA calls but were unsuccessful are eligible (and encouraged) to reapply.

For more information, visit DIANA.