NATO Innovation Fund with €1 billion opens office in Warsaw
The Alliance's venture capital fund wants to invest directly in deep tech companies from the region. Five Polish companies have already gone through the NATO DIANA accelerator.
NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), a venture capital fund with €1 billion in capital contributed by 24 Alliance countries, announced on Tuesday, 13 October, the opening of a permanent office in Warsaw. It is the fund's first physical branch outside its headquarters in Amsterdam. The first member of the Warsaw team is Jan Duthel, who is responsible for cooperation with innovators, investors and the defense industry in Central and Eastern Europe. Contact with Polish companies is to be facilitated by the Polish Chamber of Dual Use.
The Warsaw office is to search for deep tech companies (based on advanced scientific and engineering research), help portfolio companies move from pilot projects to orders, and develop cooperation with governments, industry and PFR Ventures. The fund is looking for dual-use technologies, meaning civilian and military applications: unmanned systems, radars detecting drones, space technologies, semiconductors, new materials, biotechnology and quantum technologies.
NIF takes equity stakes in companies at stages from seed rounds to Series B. It does not finance startups at the earliest stage and is not a grant program. Sources differ on the size of the first investment: My Company Polska (opens in a new tab) and Defence24 report €3-10 million, while Mam Startup (opens in a new tab), in a text based on information from the fund itself, reports €3-15 million. Indirectly, the fund is already present in Poland through investments in the Expeditions and OTB Ventures funds.
Some Polish companies had previously gone through the NATO DIANA accelerator. The program does not take equity, but provides contract funding, mentoring and access to more than 200 testing centers. Five Polish companies qualified for it: Revobeam (jamming-resistant antennas), IS-Wireless (flexible field networks), Microamp Solutions (private 5G networks), Blue Armada Robotics (unmanned surface vessels) and ResQuant (cryptography resistant to quantum computers). In May 2026, NATO DIANA announced that Microamp had signed a contract with the UK Ministry of Defence for tests and operational trials of its technology. Since January 2026, a DIANA accelerator run by AGH and Krakow Technology Park has been operating in Krakow.
For Polish dual-use technology companies, this means that the NATO fund is looking for companies to invest in through a team operating in Warsaw. Participation in DIANA does not guarantee an offer from NIF, however, and the investment decision depends on the company's business performance.