NATO DIANA Challenge Areas and Cohorts
Each DIANA cohort is recruited against a specific set of innovation challenges targeting dual-use technologies for defence and security. Nineteen challenge areas have featured across the 2024-2026 cohorts, plus the Warfighters special challenge.
Decision Superiority for NATO Warfighters
Run with NATO Allied Command Operations (ACO) & Task Force Maven, targeting mature technologies (TRL 7+ focus). Selectees receive €100,000 in contractual funding.
Browse by technology theme
Challenge areas change name every cohort, so the tracker groups them into stable technology themes for cross-year comparison. This is a tracker classification, not an official NATO taxonomy.
2024 Cohort
44 selectees from 1,300+ applicants · ~3.4% selection rate · 3 challenge areas2025 Cohort
72 selectees from 2,600+ applicants · ~2.8% selection rate · 5 challenge areas2026 Cohort
150 selectees from 3,600+ applicants · ~4.2% selection rate · 10 challenge areasCompany distribution across challenge areas
Ranked by tracked company records. Challenge areas that recur across cohorts, such as energy and sensing, accumulate records from more than one round.
| Challenge area | Companies | Share | Relative size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sensing & Surveillance2024, 2025 | 29 | 10.5% | |
| Energy & Power2025, 2026 | 29 | 10.5% | |
| Critical Infrastructure & Logistics2025, 2026 | 29 | 10.5% | |
| Data & Information Security2025 | 17 | 6.2% | |
| Secure Information Sharing2024 | 16 | 5.8% | |
| Advanced Communication Technologies2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Contested Electromagnetic Environments2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Data Assisted Decision Making2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Human Resilience & Biotechnology2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Maritime Operations2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Operations in Extreme Environments2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Resilient Space Operations2026 | 15 | 5.5% | |
| Autonomy & Unmanned Systems2026 | 14 | 5.1% | |
| Energy Resilience2024 | 13 | 4.7% | |
| Human Health & Performance2025 | 13 | 4.7% | |
| Decision Superiority for NATO Warfighterswarfighters | 10 | 3.6% |
Methodology and limitations
Challenge areas are taken verbatim from the DIANA announcement for each cohort. A company is counted once per selection record, so a company selected in two rounds appears under both challenge areas.
Where DIANA has not published the challenge area for a selectee, the record is shown as not publicly available rather than assigned to a category.
Alliance Tech Tracker is independent and unofficial and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NATO or DIANA. Where a value is not published, records show "Not publicly available" rather than an estimate. See the full methodology.
Sources
Dataset version 2026.08 · data as of August 2026 · last reviewed 2026-08-23 · explore or download the full dataset