The Portuguese team RAID has achieved second place in the European Defence Fund (EDF) hackathon, earning recognition as one of Europe’s top defence and space innovation solutions. The competition brought together eight national hackathon winners, representing 471 participants and 129 innovations from countries including Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, and Portugal.
RAID’s distributed radar system offers a low-cost, resilient aerial target detection network, applying a “swarm” concept to radar nodes. After winning the Lisbon stage of the EUDIS Defence Hackathon, the team earned €5,000 and the opportunity to demonstrate the solution in a real-world environment during ARTEx26, an operational exercise of the Portuguese Army, which this year coincides with HEDI–OPEX 2026, the European Defence Agency’s technology experimentation exercise.
Team members—experts in aerospace, RF communications, mechatronics, and business development—emphasize that 2026 will be crucial for securing funding, partnerships, and scaling their technology. “This recognition reinforces our belief that our project has real potential in the European defense innovation ecosystem,” said João Lopes, RAID’s founder.
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