As the global alliance met to discuss how to tackle growing security threats, Euronews Next spoke to some of the start-ups NATO is working with.
On the occasion of its 75th anniversary, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated this week a summit in Washington DC in which Ukraine occupied a prominent place. But the new technologies and startups will underpin their ambitions to adapt to confront current threats to safety.
The I’LL TAKE stated in his Washington Summit Declaration that has accelerated its transformation to address current and future threats and maintain its technological advantage, which it will do through experimentation and rapid adoption of emerging technologies.
Technologies like artificial intelligence (IA), day biotechnology and the quantum technology They are evolving and innovating at an extraordinarily rapid pace and NATO states that its goal is to take advantage of these types of innovations.
“What we have long recognized is that one of the foundations of our capabilities is to deter and defend our technological advantage“Phil Lockwood, head of NATO’s innovation unit, told ‘Euronews Next’ before the Washington summit.
However, he said that although we may be in an era of technological innovation that we have never had before in terms of pace“we are in a position where that technological advantage that we have relied on is potentially being eroded.”
“We have to work hard to continue maintaining this advantagebecause there are adversaries and competitors who actively seek their own technological advantage,” he added.
One of the technologies that NATO is studying is seabed mapping. The advocacy organization has invested in Dutch start-up Lobster Robotics.
“If they had surveying equipment, they could have found or seen the explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. I don’t know if they would be inclined to do anything about it, but at least they would have known it was going to happen,” Stephan Rutten, co-founder and CEO of Lobster Robotics, explains to ‘Euronews Next’.
Lobster Robotics es one of the 44 companies selected of the 1,300 who requested to participate in the NATO startup funding programknown as Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantico DIANA.
Its mission is to find dual-use innovations and provide developers with the resources, valued at several hundred thousand euros, and the network they need to address critical defense and security challenges.
Dual use is one of the DIANA criteria, which means that an innovation can be used for commercial and social purposes, as well as for defense. NATO also has a larger fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, to promote start-ups.
The technology of optical seafloor mapping by Lobster Robotics You can zoom in to see what’s on the sea floor, even spot the footprints of a crab or starfish on the seabed.
It drastically reduces the cost of using diving equipment and is much safer. But it can also be used in defense, especially to map critical underwater infrastructure, such as wind farms or oil platforms, where security is lacking.
The difficulties of this type of ‘start-ups’
But access to governments or defense ministries is lucrative and for a start-up it is difficult to break through. “You have to know the people. You have to know the people. “You have to know how the organization works,” says Rutten, adding that NATO’s “seal of approval” helps the company work with governments.
“I urge governments to really think about the time scale of start-ups. They say they go too fast. And then I hear that acquisitions will only take another 18 months… Yo I could have created five new companies by then“he added.
ADVERTISINGThe company Sortiria Technology, based in Greece, is another of the companies submarine intelligence selected by NATO for which the acquisition period has also been especially long.
It is a deep-tech start-up that develops AI detection technology for the defense industry.
“There are long contracting cycles and the purchasing process is a concentrated process and is also different in each country.“, says Angelos Tsereklas, CEO of Sortiria Technology.
“But we see many disruptions in that model, with initiatives like DIANA or the NATO Innovation Fund. But also of the European Union and the European Investment Bankwhich support dual-use applications,” he explains to ‘Euronews Next’.
ADVERTISING“We see this picture and we see an effort for a consolidated approach in the European Union and in the NATO countries,” he added.
This month, NATO launched a call for a second round of the DIANA project, focused on areas such as energythe Human healththe security of the informationthe logistics and the critical infrastructure.
Information security, or cybersecurity, is a major concern for NATO, and many lessons can be learned from Ukraine, which suffered a spate of sophisticated cyberattacks by Russia.
Cyberwars and cyberattacks
In its Washington Summit Declaration, the global defense alliance warned of the cyber threats from Russia and Chinaand stated that both countries could even collaborate in a strategic partnership.
ADVERTISINGNATO also announced at the summit a own new cyber alliancewhich will be called Integrated Cyber Defense Center. The center will bring together civilian and military personnel from across the NATO enterprise, allied countries and industry experts.
One startup that has caught NATO’s attention is Hushmeshwhich is creating a safer and more efficient internet which he calls “the new web”.
Although this may take a decade or two to take off, the company’s CEO Manu Fontaine said that “the natural path is to start developing services on an infrastructure that is intrinsically secure, intrinsically verified.”
Until then, the American company is developing a courier service which he hopes will be used by NATO allies as part of a pilot project in 2025. “We can’t see what the infrastructure does,” Fontaine told ‘Euronews Next’.
ADVERTISING“We do not have access to the messages that circulate through it. The data is actually encrypted with keys that no human being has access to.”
The Washington Summit Declaration also stated that NATO wants to closely follow the technological advances on the battlefield in Ukraineincluding through experimentation and faster adoption of emerging technologies.
For the CEO of Lobster Robotics, although public procurement is a “nightmare”, things are changing little by little.
“Many countries are now changing to be more agile and open their arms more quickly to innovation, basically because see how well it works in Ukraine“says Rutten. “They do new things every day and they get better and better. “But I think it will still be a few years before we really see it in action.”
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