Defense Innovation Unit - DIU

02/23/2025

: Joint Office Hours signups are now open! 🤝 AFWERX and SpaceWERX are excited to invite innovators to meet 1:1 with our teams and other U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) innovation units at Capital Factory House Austin during . AFWERX and SpaceWERX team members will be joined by the following participants: Defense Innovation Unit - DIU, NavalX, Department of Defense Office of Small Business Programs, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - DARPA and more.

📍 Sunday, March 9
📍 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. CT
📍 Capital Factory (8th floor)

Spots are limited - don't miss the opportunity to discuss your ideas and get valuable feedback. Register today! ▶️ https://ow.ly/78tR50V3FzW

04/13/2024

04/09/2024

As the annual Space Foundation's National Space Symposium kicks off this week, we are excited to share the newly released 2023 State of the Space Industrial Base (SSIB) report. The report highlights a number of critical pillars the U.S. faces in the emerging space economy. Topics include assessing the current state of launch, satellite communications, remote sensing, as well as challenges in policy, finance, and workforce development.

Now in its fifth year, the SSIB report is a joint project between the United States Space Force Air Force Research Laboratory - AFRL and the Defense Innovation Unit - DIU and draws on the expertise of many partners including, NewSpace New Mexico Space Florida, Space Northwest and others.

Among the report recommendations is the need to embrace a collective North Star vision for space that is inclusive of the United States, its allies, and global partners as an enduring advantage for economic prosperity and collective security in the 21st century.

We're a fast-moving DoD organization contracting with commercial companies to solve national security problems

02/10/2024

When Defense Innovation Unit - DIU launched in 2015, our goal was to rebuild a bridge between the Department of Defense and the tech sector.

We then went on to prove a model of prototyping and then scaling a process where challenges could be solved through commercial solutions, in months rather than years.

Now, we are evolving into our next phase, leveraging commercial technology, and our proven process for even greater strategic impact.

“The challenge now is to take the capabilities developed during DIU 2.0 and apply them with the focus, scale, and speed necessary to deliver the strategic effect required. This is what DIU 3.0 is all about,” Doug Beck, director of DIU.

Read more about the public DIU 3.0 plan that we published in partnership with the Center for a New American Security - CNAS and what it means for the future of the national security innovation base.

We're a fast-moving DoD organization contracting with commercial companies to solve national security problems

01/20/2024

It was a pleasure to meet with the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) team to find ways to leverage commercial technology for strategic imapct.

SOCOM hosted Defense Innovation Unit - DIU Director Doug Beck to collaborate with SOF Acquisition, Technology and Logistics leaders. Program executives highlighted our partnerships with industry to further DoD technology development, demonstrating senior-leadership focus on leveraging high-performing technologies as critical to the U.S. military’s strategic advantage.

SOCOM and are both uniquely positioned to collaborate on as needed by the warfighters and can rapidly scale technologies to operations.

12/09/2023

Great conversations this week with United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and other senior leaders on and .

09/19/2023

Doctors have used microscopes for more than 100 years but full digitization of microscopy has lagged due to the enormous amount of data. Defense Innovation Unit - DIU , along with our partners at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, are working on a new medical frontier leveraging AI to potentially transform healthcare.

DIU's Predictive Health project, leveraging an enabled microscope or the "self driving car of microscopes," can make inferences in real time, in the doctor's lab, even offline.

This collaboration also includes VA Ventures, an innovations team at Veterans Affairs (VA) Puget Sound Health Care System, along with partners JENOPTIK, Google, and DoD’s Chief Data and AI Office.

Read more about the project below. And Augmented Reality Microscopes will be available on GSA soon.

03/02/2023

Leveraging new and expanding commercial synthetic drop-in fuels technology has the potential to shift the United States Department of Defense fuel resupply paradigm in favor of synthetic fuel production at or near the point of need.

Small-scale, highly-mobile, and rapidly-deployable synthetic fuel production systems would decouple fuel from a constrained logistics environment and deter adversary targeting while also providing decarbonization pathways for the future joint forces.

Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) partnered with the United States Air Force, the Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund ( ), along with support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Army’s Office of the Chief of Engineers —to award a contract to AIR COMPANY.

The award funds Project SynCE (Synthetic Fuels for the Contested Environment), which aims to create fuel from the atmosphere’s most abundant pollutant, carbon dioxide (CO2.)

Watch video here: https://youtu.be/Bi-uHMFD4FM

Learn more about project. https://www.diu.mil/latest/department-of-defense-to-prototype-use-of-synthetic-fuels-for-contested

We're a fast-moving DoD organization contracting with commercial companies to solve national security problems

02/23/2023

The Defense Innovation Unit has selected Access to Advanced Health Institute and Ena Therapeutics to prototype a small-molecule nasal spray designed to improve the immunity of U.S. troops against respiratory viruses.As part of the Department of Defense's Project Panacea, Ena will produce a broad-spe

02/23/2023

Looking forward to expanding this partnership to get more commercial capabilites to the United States Air Force.

A memorandum of agreement between the Digital Directorate’s Weather Systems Branch and the Defense Innovation Unit gives Hanscom personnel access to a unique, time-saving contracting process.

02/16/2023

02/02/2023

Exciting to see our effort expand!

Canoo's Battery Technology is on its way to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for analysis and demonstration: ​
✔️ NASA ​
✔️ U.S. Army ​
✔️ DoD​

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3jf8Uwp
U.S. Army Defense Innovation Unit - DIU