The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) and Defence Innovation Network Finland (DEFINE) have launched a new partnership to help NIF-backed startups pilot and test products. The news was announced at Resilience Conference in London today, where the pair signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
The collaboration will see NIF portfolio companies participate in exercises and pilots in Finland. The startups to be involved in the partnership have yet to be named. NIF will be selecting who participates and facilitating the activity.
“Startups and investors and organisations can turn innovation into capability and reality,” said John Ridge, chief adoption officer of the NATO Innovation Fund, speaking on stage at the conference.
Indeed, the deal underscores one of the tricky aspects of defence tech.
We’re seeing a boom of innovation at the moment thanks to a number of factors — among them, a huge surge in funding; the tensions of a very tech-driven war just over the border from the NATO Alliance; and a boom in hardware and AI innovation.
However, just about every defence tech company struggles to secure opportunities to try out their products to show end users that they work, to tweak them if they don’t, and (in the case of AI systems) to gather more training data. This is one reason why so many startups travel to Ukraine with defence tech in tow.
One person described testing as “the missing piece for turning tech into deployed capability.”
The idea is that this partnership will at least solve that problem for some NIF portfolio companies.
On the Finnish side, there are also some wins. It gives the country a chance to check out the tech for its own purposes. And it gives an opportunity to integrators and other local partners: they’ll work with NIF portfolio companies to get their products working within the exercises and pilots, and if there are contracts at the end of those exercises, they may well also become a part of the mix.
“This is not only about the business but about the capability,” said Teemu Seppälä, the director of DEFINE on stage today at the ceremony. “We have something really exciting here.”
From what we understand, Finland is the first country that has been announced as a partner, but it’s not likely to be the last. Finland is a good place because it ticks all the right boxes: the weather is extreme, it’s a contested environment, and it’s right on the border with Russia. “If it works here, it will probably work anywhere,” the person said.
There is no direct financial relationship around the partnership between NIF and DEFINE, although the local partners may well be providing services for a fee.
NIF and DEFINE have some history. NIF portfolio companies such as Kelluu, Tekever, Stark, Titan and Arx Robotics have participated in NATO Innovation Range demonstrations across Finland. These were organised by DEFINE and in cooperation with the Finnish Ministry of Defence and NATO.
DEFINE’s innovation ecosystem was born in the Finnish city of Riihimäki, and thanks to funding from Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, earlier this year the ecosystem announced it would expand throughout Finland. The partnership with NIF can only further expand DEFINE’s reach.
