NATO Innovation Fund closes €1 billion to support startups addressing defence and security challenges

The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) is the world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund and will invest 1 billion euros in startups developing dual-use deep technologies that can be used both for military as well as civilian purposes. The Fund was established in 2023 by twenty-three NATO Allies and Estonia is one of them through SmartCap.

NIF is one part of a one-two punch that NATO is making to broker more engagement with startups and innovation-focused businesses in its footprint. It’s also building out the NATO – Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) to back and work more closely with startups that are building deeptech and dual-use solutions — those that might have a straightforward and obvious application in NATO’s core activities, but also longer-term applications that might not.

DIANA in Estonia is led by the Tehnopol Startup Incubator and the application round for startups to join DIANA is open until August 25th. 

Learn more about NATO DIANA at https://www.diana.nato.int/.

Read the article about NIF from Techcrunch.