NATO DIANA 2026 Cohort: All Companies, by Country and Challenge

NATO DIANA's 2026 cohort is made up of 150 companies from 24 NATO countries, announced on 10 December 2025. They were picked for the 2026 Challenge Programme across ten challenge areas, 15 companies per area, and each one receives €100,000 of contractual funding. By our count of DIANA's official list, 104 of the 150 come from European Allies (counting Türkiye), led by the United Kingdom with 27.

Below: what DIANA is, how the cohort was chosen, which companies went on to the Mission Track, and the full list of all 150 companies with country and challenge area.

What is NATO DIANA?

DIANA, the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, is NATO's accelerator for dual-use technology. It is headquartered in London, with a regional hub in Tallinn and a North American office in Halifax, according to its website.

DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund were both launched under the NATO 2030 agenda, but they do different jobs. DIANA is run by NATO staff, runs a competitive accelerator and pays non-dilutive funding; the fund is an independent venture investor that takes equity, as the NATO Innovation Fund explains. We track the fund's deals in a separate piece on the NATO Innovation Fund portfolio.

The 2026 programme runs through 16 accelerator sites and more than 200 test centres across the 32 NATO nations, according to the NATO announcement. When the cohort was announced, James Appathurai was DIANA's interim managing director. DIANA's May 2026 release names Jyoti Hirani-Driver as managing director, while a June 2026 release calls her acting managing director.

How the 2026 cohort was selected

DIANA sets public challenges based on Allied priorities and selects companies through a competitive call. For the 2026 programme the call drew more than 3,600 proposals, according to DIANA; BetaKit reported "almost 3,700" submissions on 10 December 2025. The ten challenge areas were:

• Energy and Power
• Advanced Communication Technologies
• Contested Electromagnetic Environments
• Human Resilience and Biotechnologies
• Critical Infrastructure and Logistics
• Operations in Extreme Environments
• Maritime Operations
• Resilient Space Operations
• Autonomy and Unmanned Systems
• Data Assisted Decision Making

Funding. Each selected innovator receives €100,000 of contractual funding to keep iterating its solution during the accelerator programme. At 150 companies, that adds up to €15 million for the first phase (our arithmetic; DIANA has not published a total).

Phases. The programme started in January 2026 with 16 regional kick-offs across the Alliance. Companies get mentoring, access to test centres and contact with military end-users and investors. The strongest then compete for the Mission Track, an adoption-focused follow-on of five to seven months worth up to €300,000 in additional contractual funding.

Mission Track: the 15 companies that moved on

On 29 May 2026 DIANA named the first five Mission Track companies: Fieldmade (Norway), JET Connectivity (United Kingdom), Mesodyne (United States), SkyFi (United States) and Spacedrip (Estonia). It said up to ten more would follow in August.

The full group of 15, from ten NATO countries, was reported by The Defense Post on 7 September 2026, with each company receiving €300,000 in non-dilutive funding. The ten added names were Alias Robotics (Spain), BruhnBruhn Innovation (Sweden), CET, Cohesys (Canada), Deep Breathe (Canada), Hefring Marine (Iceland), Infrahex (Czechia), Oledcomm (France), Spaceflux (United Kingdom) and VIG-SEC Drone (Spain). CET matches Composite Energy Technologies (United States) on the cohort list. We could not open DIANA's own September release, so this list relies on The Defense Post.

Ten of the 15 Mission Track companies are European, close to Europe's share of the full cohort (104 of 150).

European companies in the 2026 cohort

Counting the country tags on DIANA's official list, European Allies supplied 104 companies. The United States had 24 and Canada 22. The European breakdown:

• United Kingdom: 27
• Germany: 9; Italy: 9
• France: 7; Spain: 6
• Netherlands, Norway and Sweden: 5 each
• Belgium, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia and Türkiye: 3 each
• Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Luxembourg and Portugal: 2 each
• Iceland, Latvia, Romania and Slovakia: 1 each

Two discrepancies are worth flagging. The list carries 25 different country tags, while DIANA's announcement says 24 countries. And it tags 22 companies as Canadian, while BetaKit counted 20 Canadian companies on announcement day.

Some European names to know:

• Delian Alliance Industries is in the Autonomy and Unmanned Systems challenge with low-cost GPS-denied navigation for drones. DIANA lists it under the United Kingdom; a 2025 NATO Innovation Fund release describes it as Greece-based.
• Kreios Space (Spain) is in Resilient Space Operations with air-breathing propulsion for very low Earth orbit. It is also a NATO Innovation Fund portfolio company.
• Fieldmade (Norway), with deployable additive manufacturing micro-factories, and Spacedrip (Estonia), with containerised water logistics, were among the first five Mission Track picks.
• Germany's nine entries span secure communications and cyber (Enclaive, VISS), AI (NeuralAgent, Aereus), batteries (TAURiON), exoskeletons (Auxsys) and medical and explosives detection technology (Herges Detection, Lysando, Hellstern medical).

For more European companies in these fields, see our directory and the autonomy and AI, space and ISR and maritime sector pages.

Full list: all 150 companies in the NATO DIANA 2026 cohort

This table follows DIANA's official 2026 cohort page, in its order (by challenge, then alphabetical). We dropped legal suffixes such as Ltd or GmbH and kept DIANA's country tags. The list was unchanged between January and late September 2026 apart from minor name edits.

What comes next: the 2027 challenges

On 1 June 2026 DIANA launched six new challenges for its 2027 cohort, with proposals due by 3 July 2026. The 2027 accelerator programme starts in January 2027 and runs for six months, again with €100,000 of contractual funding per company. The six areas are Human Survivability; Multidomain Autonomy of Uncrewed Systems; Multidomain Sensing and Advanced Data Processing for Intelligence and Surveillance; Operational Resilience in Contested Environments; Responsive Logistics; and Scalable and Adaptable Countermeasures for Air Defence.

For founders, DIANA can lead to private capital. Finland's Kelluu completed two phases of the DIANA programme before the NATO Innovation Fund led its €15 million Series A in April 2026. The question for the 2026 cohort is how many of the 150 make the same jump to adoption contracts or venture rounds by the end of the programme.