The Kluz Prize for PeaceTech has published its first Annual Frontier Report: a benchmark of the technologies built to save lives, prevent violence, and rebuild trust, and an argument for why capital should follow them.
The economic impact of violence reached roughly $21.8 trillion in 2025, about 10.5% of global GDP. Global military expenditure rose around 5% over the same period. Spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping totalled $49.2 billion, roughly 0.5% of what the world spends on its militaries.
Capital is flowing toward the tools of war and away from the tools of prevention, precisely as conflicts multiply. That asymmetry is the starting point for the Annual Frontier Report 2026, the inaugural edition of the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech’s yearly benchmark on frontier technologies serving peace and humanity. It draws on almost five years of the Prize, including more than 500 applications from innovators in over 82 countries, together with extensive desk research and our investment experience at Kluz Ventures.
The frontier has moved
The report’s central argument is that the frontier has shifted, and continues to accelerate. The tools that defined PeaceTech even a few years ago (threat dashboards, mediation platforms, fact-checking services, SMS reporting, satellite snapshots) remain essential, but they are no longer the frontier. The action, the risk, and the opportunity have moved to nine emerging trends:
- From analytic AI to agentic AI: AI that acts, not just predicts
- From single machines to autonomous and swarm robotics
- From satellite data to space infrastructure and services
- From “more data” to trustworthy data
- From classical to quantum-era assumptions
- From digital-only to biosecurity
- From monitoring conflict to verifying restraint
- From technology for resource security to conflict prevention
- From vulnerable systems to resilient critical infrastructure
Each is documented through the innovations already putting it to work, drawn from an index of more than 100 PeaceTech use cases spanning the full conflict cycle.
A test, not a slogan
PeaceTech is distinct from both war technology, which projects force, and defense technology, which detects and deters threats. The distinction lies not in the technology itself but in its purpose, governance, and intended outcomes, which makes the category easy to claim and harder to verify.
The report therefore proposes a Peace Dividend Test: nine criteria a genuine PeaceTech application should contribute to, from saving lives and preventing violence through to safeguarding human dignity and ethical oversight. To separate a real peace dividend from a marketed one, it asks every technology to answer five questions: what measurable peace outcome it creates, who benefits and who is excluded, how impact will be measured over time, what evidence supports the claim today, and whether misuse could outweigh the expected benefit.
For investors, that is a diligence instrument as much as a definition.
Where the capital case sits
Different PeaceTech technologies require different forms of capital. A demining-robotics company can raise a venture round; a biosecurity-verification protocol or a sovereign data commons may never fit a venture return profile, and instead needs patient public or philanthropic money. Mismatching the financing model to the technology is one of the quiet reasons promising PeaceTech stalls.
The report also takes seriously the strongest objection to its own thesis, the visibility paradox: better prediction and monitoring has not reliably produced decisive preventive action. Its response is that the binding constraint is usually acting rather than sensing, which argues for directing capital at decision-support built into real workflows, verification tooling that raises the cost of inaction, and impact measurement, precisely the tooling the field has least of.
Underneath the funding gap sits a connotation problem. “Defense” reads as serious and strategic, while “peace” reads as soft. It is worth stating plainly that preventing a war is one of the highest-return, hardest-nosed things a technology can support. One route past that divide is triple-use technology, which delivers a genuine peace dividend alongside commercial and defense applicability.
The largest gap is not at the research stage but in the missing middle, between a working pilot and operational adoption, where a technology needs a first customer, a certification, a procurement contract, and the patient capital to survive the years before scale.
Read the report
Read more about the report at the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech, including the nine trends in depth, the risk-opportunity matrix, and a view of where PeaceTech lands by 2035.