TAK-HACK 2025: Innovation Under Pressure
PRESS RELEASE – For Immediate Release
DATE: Tuesday 26 August 2025
Beaten Zone Venture Partners (BZV) has concluded TAK-HACK 2025, a three-day hackathon at The Precinct in Brisbane, with over 120 Participant Expressions of Interest, 27 Mentors and 13 Volunteers. TAK-HACK brought together innovators, end users and technologists to co-create new solutions using TAK (Team Awareness Kit).
The challenge was clear:
“How might we use TAK to better enable allied warfighters to deconflict offensive support assets and gain better situational awareness during the dynamic clearance of a large urban structure?”
This event was not about hypothetical problems; it’s about building things that matter, based on lived experience from the field and backed by defence-aligned tech.
Over one intense weekend, participants were asked to forget what “should” or “could” be done and focus on execution. BZV General Manager Peta Ellis opened the event with a call to action: “Be hungry for solutions. Execution is everything.”
The program featured a keynote by Adam Modd (Lieutenant Colonel Retd, GM, DSD), industry presentations from the Australian Industry & Defence Network (AIDN), Astute Systems and KPMG, insights from the Australian Army BattleLab, and a TAK technical deep dive with Damian Ridge. Teams quickly formed on Day 1 and worked around the clock with the support of experienced mentors and tireless volunteers.
Sponsors and trusted partners including AIDN, Astute Systems, KPMG, Buzzworks , Warfighter Coffee, Armatech Industries, EPE, Black Sky Industries and NIOA, along with the Australian Army and Queensland Police Service, provided critical backing to make TAK-HACK possible.
Nine teams pitched their innovations on Sunday afternoon:
- ThumbTAK : A simple, customisable plugin enabling rapid operator level control and emergency integration.
- Rolling Through (Project ODIN): A situational awareness tool that decentralises command and reduces the risk of team-on-team incidents.
- TAK to the Future: A haptic and audio alert system integrated with TAK to rapidly identify friend or foe.
- The Sixth Man: Real time AI image analysis for urban clearance, logging activity and providing automated feedback via TAK.
- SwiftEVAC: Streamlined triage for mass casualty events using biometric sensors for faster, more accurate casualty management.
- SEEL Team SIX (TAKRescue): An AI backed plugin enabling self-organising first responder swarms to allocate tasks and resources more efficiently in disaster zones.
- SLInt: Digital beacons integrated into TAK to replace cyalume (glow) sticks for room clearance and tactical signalling.
- AC853 (CLEAR): A collaborative tool enhancing three-dimensional situational awareness for military and emergency services through shared georeferenced markup.
- Edge Computing (Mission Mesh): A resilient mesh network system enabling small teams to coordinate large area searches with room-by-room visibility, live floorplan updates and extended comms indoors.
The judging panel assessed each project on novelty, feasibility, integration, readiness and ease of adoption. Judges included:
- Steve Baxter, Founder and Lead Investor, BZV
- Ross Newman, Founder, Astute Systems (our TAK Guru in Residence)
- Nicola Kloet, Systems Engineer, Frequentis Australasia
- LTCOL Philip Wong, Australian Army BattleLab
- A senior representative from the Queensland Police Service
Winners announced:
- First Place: SLInt
- Second Place: ThumbTAK
- Crowd Favourite Pitch: SLInt
Prizes included a VIP lunch with Steve Baxter, an exclusive guided tour of NIOA’s facility, team passes to iFly Australia, paintball, and BZV swag packs.
Steve Baxter said: “Hackathons like TAK-HACK create sovereign innovation under fire. In just one weekend we saw fresh ideas that could change how warfighters operate in complex environments. This kind of fast, practical problem solving is exactly what Australia needs to strengthen our national security.”
Kelly Hopkins, National Defence Director at Hays and Queensland Ambassador for Women in Defence Australia (WiDA), added: “Beaten Zone TAK-HACK wasn’t just a hackathon — it was a 54-hour sprint where innovation collided with real-world Defence challenges. Brisbane’s first-ever Defence Tech hackathon brought together creators, coders, students, veterans, and tactical thinkers to solve a complex mission: leveraging ATAK to support allied warfighters in dynamically clearing large urban structures. The energy? Electric. The outcomes? Outstanding. Teams quickly identified capability gaps, collaborated across disciplines, and built practical, bold solutions that could reshape how we approach battlespace management.”
Across 48 hours and more than 26 hours of active hacking, TAKHACK 2025 showed what happens when Defence professionals, technologists, students and entrepreneurs are pushed to solve real-world problems under pressure.
Beaten Zone Ventures thanks all participants, mentors, sponsors and partners who made TAK-HACK possible. The ingenuity and energy on display proved that when the right people come together, the future of Defence technology can be shaped in a single weekend.
-Ends-
ABOUT TAK
The Team Awareness Kit (TAK); known as the Tactical Assault Kit in military use, is a suite of software providing situational awareness, geospatial information and advanced collaboration tools. Originally developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory and now maintained by a Joint Product Center, TAK includes a family of products: TAK Server (Linux), WinTAK (Windows), ATAK (Android) and iTAK (Apple). ATAK (including CivTAK) is a smartphone-based app that delivers geospatial intelligence, navigation, precision targeting and real-time data sharing to enhance coordination and decision-making in complex environments.
ABOUT BEATEN ZONE VENTURE PARTNERS
Beaten Zone is headquartered in Brisbane and will invest in sovereign early-stage businesses with products having material military use, that help to contribute to Australian and allied war-fighters lethality and survivability. The scope precludes investments involved with controversial weapons, e.g., landmines, or other capabilities that would violate Australian ratified treaties or agreements.
MEDIA CONTACT
Laura Blue: laura@kickercomms.com
Ashford Pritchard: ash@kickercomms.com
ABOUT STEVE BAXTER (www.stevebaxter.com.au)
Steve is a passionate Australian, a Queenslander, and a veteran. He has been investing into the Australian technology scene since 2011 with over 90 companies funded. He was the founder of South Australian dial up ISP SE Net, and co-founder of Brisbane based whole telecommunication company PIPE Networks. Following successful exits, Steve started River City Labs, Startup Catalyst, River Pitch and TEN13 as well spending one year as Queensland Chief Entrepreneur and four seasons on the Channel Ten show Shark Tank. Founder and lead investor in Beaten Zone Venture Partners.
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