Sprouts of promise bud in NATO’s tech incubator

AUSTIN, Texas—Dozens of startups are making their way through NATO’s new tech accelerator, and some are making progress that could soon lead to potentially game-changing technologies, according to the organization's director. 

“Right across the board inside the energy resilience space, the sensing and surveillance, and in the secure information sharing, we've seen some really interesting things, which I think within 24 months, could actually be starting to do real things in the world,” Deeph Chana, the managing director for NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, said during a talk at the Capital Factory House as part of the SXSW mega-conference. 

“Energy resilience, in particular, things that can enable microgrid architectures, and enable energy generation and storage in remote locations…energy storage technologies, we've seen a couple of really, really promising things.”

Last year, NATO launched the tech accelerator and introduced the first class of startups.  

This year, Chana said the goal is to have that cohort graduate and for the organization to take lessons from that class into future cohorts. 

“We've got our first cohort going through the accelerator program, seeing them successfully graduate, and then learning the lessons from them,” he said.

There’s also still work to be done to grow DIANA as an organization, which launched in 2021 but took a yearslong hiatus, including culture, governance, and making sure it’s “sustainably, stable for the future,” Chana said. 

“This is the thing that's occupied a lot of my time in the last seven or eight months. And it's going to continue to be an issue and a challenge in future, because it's a very novel thing we're trying to do” across a large geographical area, Chana said. 

“So I think in the next year or so getting a substantial part of the main part of the organization in place. We've got the leadership team in, but we're still hiring quite a few people,” over the next year, he said.

DIANA is also building two test centers in Finland that will focus on secure communications, quantum, and space technologies at the Otaniemi office of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and 6G at the University of Oulu. 

The organization is also hosting some invitation-only industry days with the startups to help pair them with investors,and possibly mentors.

“Those companies are not just after capital, of course. They're also after mentors and guides, who can help them understand what they might be able to do with their particular ideas; what the best pathways for growth might be. So there's a multitude of things, I think, that we can expect to gain,” Chana said.