We are delighted to announce that Virtual Routes has been awarded a grant of $1,250,000 over three years from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish the Emerging Technology and Security Observatory.
This support marks an important step in Virtual Routes’ journey. It gives us the capacity to expand our work at the intersection of technology and security, building on the community, programs, and ideas that have brought us here.
Our early work brought people together around cybersecurity, creating space to exchange ideas, develop expertise, and build relationships across Europe and beyond. That community has helped shape every stage of our growth.
As Virtual Routes developed, we found more ways to support this community. We launched Binding Hook to make informed, accessible analysis of technology and security available to a wider audience. We expanded into education through our Cybersecurity Seminars program and our work on VIRO Learning. We developed research programs and the Pharos report series. Through our Cybersecurity Services Centre, we also began providing hands-on cybersecurity support.
Together, these activities have enabled us to more effectively connect knowledge with practice. As a nonprofit, we now do things you might expect from a think tank, a media outlet, a higher education institution, and a cybersecurity services provider.
These activities are most valuable when they intersect. A fellow can develop an idea in a workshop, publish it on Binding Hook, and bring it into a classroom. Research can inform practical work, while practical experience reveals questions that research needs to address. Building those connections has become an important part of how we work.
Through this expansion, we have largely stayed in the cybersecurity lane. Cyber and digital issues are, and will remain, central to Virtual Routes, and we will continue to develop the programs, expertise, and relationships on which our current portfolio is built.
That said, the Hewlett Foundation’s support gives us the opportunity to bring this experience to a broader set of questions at the intersection of technology and security.
The Emerging Technology and Security Observatory will examine how developments in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, semiconductors, and space technologies affect European security. It will explore the relationships between technological capabilities, industrial dependencies, and the institutions making consequential decisions about their use.
As we have learned through many years of work on cybersecurity, our approach must start with understanding the technologies themselves: how they work, who develops them, how they are financed, and what it takes to put them into practice. This grounding matters. Assessing a technology’s security implications requires close attention to its capabilities, limitations, and the systems and organizations around it.
The grant provides the seed funding to build a dedicated research team and a sustained program of fellowships, workshops, and publications. The Observatory will draw on the wider Virtual Routes network and connect its work to Binding Hook, Pharos, and our educational projects. We want the ideas developed through this work to travel: from specialist discussions into public analysis, from research into teaching, and above all into conversations with the people developing and using these technologies.
We also want to bring more people into those conversations. Across Europe and beyond, researchers, technology builders, policymakers, and practitioners often approach the same security questions from different directions. The Observatory will give them opportunities to work through those questions together, challenge assumptions, and build relationships that last.
We are grateful to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for making this next stage possible, and to everyone who has helped Virtual Routes grow. We look forward to developing the Observatory with our community and welcoming new people and perspectives into our work.
