Taiwan Defense Tech Hackathon
Time to Accelerate Defense Innovation in the Asia-Pacific 🚀
Join us and 200+ hackers for the Taiwan Defense Tech Hackathon on October 2-4, 2026, in Taipei, Taiwan. We're thrilled to co-organize this hackathon with the Unmanned Vehicles R&D Center, National Taiwan University
Connect with fellow defense innovators, meet potential co-founders, and build projects with real-world impact that could save lives. Throughout the event, you’ll get hands-on guidance from seasoned mentors, and after the hackathon, we’ll help you take your project closer to real-world deployment.
Challenges
We’ll focus on solving urgent security and defense challenges in the Taiwanese context, from countering grey-zone drone incursions and swarming threats to resilient communications under jamming and undersea cable disruption, GNSS-denied navigation across the Strait, maritime domain awareness, low-cost sensing and autonomous interception, edge AI for distributed operations, and asymmetric solutions that multiply the impact of every operator.
Goals
Solve urgent defense and security challenges: Each hackathon features a fresh set of challenges sourced directly from partners in Taiwan, the EU, NATO, and beyond, driven by real needs.
Launch new careers and companies: Whether you’re breaking into the defense sector or building your own product and company, we connect you with jobs, funding, and pathways toward real-world deployment.
Strengthen partnerships between Taiwan and Europe through defense innovation: By building and shipping real systems, we demonstrate what a fast, capable, and resilient Taiwanese defense ecosystem and strong collaboration with Europe can achieve.
Visitors
To give participants time and space to focus on their projects, we'll have no visitors during the hackathon. If you're curious about the outcomes and what the teams have built, please sign up as a visitor for our demo day on Monday.
Agenda
Friday, October 2, 2026
Kick-off Day
12:00 - Doors open, Networking
13:00 - Welcome by Organizers, Keynote
14:00 - Workshops, Team Formation, and Open-ended Networking
17:00 - Presentation of Mentors and Challenges
18:00 - Start of Hacking
Saturday, October 3, 2026
Hacking continues all day
Sunday, October 4, 2026
10:00 - Testing of Presentations
12:00 - Lunch Break, End of Hacking
Demo Day (Open to Visitors)
13:00 - Pitches of the winning teams
15:00 - Award Ceremony
15:30 - After-party & Networking