The Maritime Operations Challenge was shaped through broad consultation with NATO stakeholders and end users to better understand the nature of today’s naval challenges and identify where innovation can have the greatest impact in the future. As with other DIANA challenges such as Resilient Space Operations and Contested Electromagnetic Environments, it is a domain where innovation must contend with complexity, scale and the fundamental limitations imposed by the environment itself.
As part of this series, DIANA is spotlighting each challenge to increase awareness of its purpose and to celebrate the innovators developing solutions to pressing defence and security problems.
Delving deeper into Maritime Operations
The maritime domain is broad and deliberately represented across multiple DIANA challenges. This reflects both the diversity of maritime operational requirements and the extent to which maritime-focused companies operate in adjacent, overlapping fields such as energy, communications and operations in challenging environments.
The Maritime Operations Challenge addresses a number of enduring defence and security challenges, including:
- Detecting mines and ensuring sea lanes are clear
- Detecting submarines and underwater activity
- Protecting harbours and critical maritime infrastructure
- Maintaining awareness across vast ocean areas, triggering timely alerts and responses
The innovation focus within maritime operations is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and situational awareness: understanding what is happening on the sea surface, below the water and in the air above it. It includes the ability to detect and respond to threats such as mines, submarines and hostile activity near coastlines, harbours and critical infrastructure.
Enabling technologies, components designed to enhance already-existing tools, are vital in the maritime context. These include specialised components, energy solutions, communications systems and equipment designed to function reliably in harsh maritime conditions. The Maritime Operations challenge is not about replacing existing naval capabilities, but about enhancing them, often by integrating smaller, specialised solutions into broader operational systems. Both hardware and software solutions play a role, often working together as part of a larger operational system.
Why Maritime Operations matter
Maritime innovation must be understood in context. Defence stakeholders and end users typically seek end‑to‑end solutions, while many DIANA innovators provide a highly specialised piece of that larger capability. Veronika Yordanova, Maritime Operations Challenge Manager, explains how DIANA navigates this dynamic:
In defence, stakeholders and end users are looking for an end-end solution. Our companies often provide a smaller piece. A big part of what we do in DIANA is figuring how this small piece integrates with a bigger solution. Is the right thing to challenge the old ways? Inherently innovation is exactly that, sometimes it’s small steps and other times it’s completely different concepts that might bring new strategies and novel approaches to problems
The underwater environment is a prime example of this complexity. Maritime and particularly underwater operations are inherently challenging. The oceans remain less understood than space in many respects, creating both risks and opportunities for innovation.
For example, GPS signals and conventional electromagnetic communications do not propagate well underwater, meaning they are fundamentally unavailable. These constraints are imposed by the fundamental laws of physics, rather than technological maturity. Communications rely on acoustics. Sound travels significantly slower than electromagnetic signals, offers limited bandwidth, and cannot support sustained data‑intensive applications such as real‑time video.
Yet despite inherent environmental constraints, such conditions create possibilities for ways of thinking about how to operate within the realities of the underwater domain. Rather than attempting to overcome the laws of physics, many innovators are developing technologies designed to work within them. The challenge then becomes not only developing these solutions, but integrating them into existing naval concepts, systems and ways of operating.
This process shapes how innovation is introduced, evaluated and tested within the maritime domain. Sometimes progress emerges from incremental improvements. At other times, entirely new concepts can drastically shift how longstanding problems are approached. Veronika continues:
Navies have been solving these problems for many years, decades. But right now, the way that DIANA is supporting them is through bringing innovative solutions to the table. They’re very hard problems, we’re trying to bring something, new ideas to the field to see whether we can support or provide a different take on the old and big problems that the navies are facing every day
Innovators in focus
DIANA’s Maritime Operations cohort reflect the diversity of approaches needed to address these challenges. Below are four innovators whose solutions illustrate how cutting‑edge science and engineering can support maritime security and awareness.
Lux Bio (Canada) - Bioluminescence as a sustainable maritime capability
Lux Bio is a biotechnology company exploring the use of bioluminescence in maritime contexts. Their initial product aims to replace traditional glowsticks, which rely on toxic, non‑biodegradable chemicals, with a fully green, biologically based alternative.
Beyond this initial application, the technology has the potential to offer disruptive new ways to provide low-impact visual signalling or illumination in maritime environments with the potential to unlock entirely new maritime use cases.
Unplugged (Norway)- Underwater wireless charging and communication
Unplugged is developing underwater wireless charging and communication systems that are already proven in the civilian sector, particularly in oil and gas. Their technology can operate at depths of up to 3,000 metres and is now being adapted to meet defence requirements.
By enabling underwater autonomous vehicles to recharge without surfacing, Unplugged’s solution allows for longer, wider‑area and more discreet underwater operations. This reduces vulnerability and enables persistent presence beneath the surface.
Cleardrop (France) - Keeping sensors clear in harsh maritime conditions
Cleardrop has developed a solution to a deceptively simple but persistent problem: keeping sensors and screens clear in wet, frosty, muddy and salty environments.
At sea, salt residue and water droplets can quickly obscure sensor surfaces, affecting the quality of the data they capture. Their technology uses a nano‑scale acoustic transducer that generates subtle vibrations on the inside of a sensor surface which instantly remove water, salt or debris without disrupting the sensor itself.
Originating from a research laboratory with decades of clean‑room experience, Cleardrop’s solution is rooted in nanotechnology and is applicable beyond maritime operations, across extreme environments more broadly.
Stratesea Technologies (United States) - Automated mine recognition on the seabed
Stratesea Technologies is tackling one of the most enduring and demanding problems in maritime security: mine countermeasures.
Traditionally, identifying whether seabed objects are mines or harmless debris has required teams of highly experienced specialists analysing sonar data. Stratesea’s solution uses automatic target recognition to analyse sonar imagery, alongside multi‑sensor data fusion to reduce false alarms, such as rocks being mistaken for mines.
Developed by a small team, the system is already demonstrating results of operational relevance.
Composite Energy Technologies (CET) (United States): Autonomous deep-sea operations at scale
If we can avoid putting people in challenging conditions, we should. This is why unmanned underwater vehicles are so valuable. Composite Energy Technologies has created an autonomous, extra-large vehicle capable of mounting sensors, which can go up to 3000 metres deep. Packed with batteries, it can last a long time and is easy to ship and assemble, making it easier to deploy at scale.
Looking ahead
Across the Maritime Operations Challenge, innovators are currently focused on iteration, validation and usability. As they progress through DIANA’s programme, companies are preparing for technical evaluation and risk assessment through Testing, Evaluation, Validation and Verification (TEVV) and NATO Operational Exercises (OPEX).
Key milestones within the DIANA Accelerator Programme include engaging with the defence ecosystem at our flagship event in June, NATO DIANA International Demo Days 2026, as well as mid‑term assessments and mission‑focused evaluations. This stage is about ensuring that technologies are not only innovative, but relevant, usable and adaptable to real operational needs.
Through this work, DIANA continues to support innovators who are helping the Alliance better understand, secure and operate within the maritime domain, one of the most complex and strategically vital environments facing NATO today.