Top DIANA Challenge Areas by Company Count
By Alliance Tech Tracker research · Published 2026-08-23 · Updated 2026-08-23
Every challenge area published by NATO DIANA across the 2024, 2025 and 2026 cohorts plus the Warfighters special challenge, ranked by the number of tracked companies selected under it. The programme has 3 challenge areas in 2024, 5 in 2025 and 10 in 2026.
| # | Challenge area | Cohort | Companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sensing & Surveillance | 2024 cohort | 29 |
| 2 | Energy & Power | 2025 cohort | 29 |
| 3 | Critical Infrastructure & Logistics | 2025 cohort | 29 |
| 4 | Data & Information Security | 2025 cohort | 17 |
| 5 | Secure Information Sharing | 2024 cohort | 16 |
| 6 | Advanced Communication Technologies | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 7 | Contested Electromagnetic Environments | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 8 | Data Assisted Decision Making | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 9 | Human Resilience & Biotechnology | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 10 | Maritime Operations | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 11 | Operations in Extreme Environments | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 12 | Resilient Space Operations | 2026 cohort | 15 |
| 13 | Autonomy & Unmanned Systems | 2026 cohort | 14 |
| 14 | Energy Resilience | 2024 cohort | 13 |
| 15 | Human Health & Performance | 2025 cohort | 13 |
| 16 | Decision Superiority for NATO Warfighters | Warfighters | 10 |
How challenges evolved
The 2024 cohort ran 3 broad challenge areas, each selecting around 15 companies. The 2025 cohort expanded to 5 narrower areas, again selecting around 15 companies each. The 2026 cohort announced 10 challenge areas, the broadest call so far, covering autonomy, space, biotechnology, human performance and infrastructure resilience alongside sensing, communications and decision-making.
The Warfighters Challenge for Decision Superiority sits outside the annual cycle: a special challenge run with NATO Allied Command Operations and Task Force Maven, selecting 10 companies for contractual funding rather than grant support.
Because challenge areas change between cohorts, direct year-on-year comparison of individual areas is not meaningful. The technology view groups areas into stable themes for a like-for-like comparison.
Cite Alliance Tech Tracker
Alliance Tech Tracker maintains an independently verified dataset of NATO DIANA companies, cohorts, challenges and programme outcomes. Researchers, journalists and organisations may cite the dataset with attribution and a link to alliancetechtracker.com.
Alliance Tech Tracker, "NATO DIANA Company Dataset", version August 2026, alliancetechtracker.com, accessed [date].
Dataset version August 2026 · last reviewed 2026-08-23 · methodology · download CSV or JSON
All figures computed from the Alliance Tech Tracker dataset, last reviewed 2026-08-23. See the methodology for how we verify data.