Helsing
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Helsing is a Munich-based European defense technology company that builds artificial intelligence software for the military, along with a growing range of hardware that includes strike drones, an autonomous combat aircraft, and underwater surveillance gliders. Founded in 2021, it has become one of the most visible and best-funded names in European defense tech, in large part because Russia's war in Ukraine pushed the continent to rearm quickly and to take software-driven warfare seriously. By mid-2025 Helsing was valued at about 12 billion euros, and in May 2026 it was reported to be raising a new round at roughly 18 billion dollars, which would make it one of Europe's most valuable private companies. [1][2][3]
The company's pitch is unusual for a defense contractor. It started as a software firm, not a builder of metal, and it frames its work explicitly around protecting democracies. The founders argue that AI is becoming the decisive factor in modern conflict and that Europe cannot outsource that capability to others. Whether you find that framing reassuring or unsettling probably says a lot about how you feel about AI in weapons generally.
Helsing was founded in 2021 by Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf, and Niklas Köhler. [4] Reil, who serves as co-chief executive, is a computational biologist who previously co-founded NaturalMotion, a company known for AI-driven animation and physics simulation that was later sold to Zynga. Scherf, the company's president, came from a different world: he was a partner at McKinsey & Company and had worked inside Germany's Ministry of Defence, where he helped set up the Bundeswehr's cyber and digital directorates. Köhler is a theoretical physicist and machine learning researcher who has published in journals including Nature. [4][5]
The early thesis was software-first. Rather than building tanks or jets, Helsing set out to write the AI layer that processes sensor and weapons data, fuses it, and turns it into something a commander can act on in real time. The company describes this as "all-domain" defense, meaning air, land, sea, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Tied to that technical bet is a political one. Helsing positions itself as a company built to serve democratic nations and to give Europe what it calls technological sovereignty, the ability to field advanced military software without depending on the United States or anyone else. [1][6]
That stance has drawn comparisons to the American firm Palantir and to Anduril, the US defense startup founded by Palmer Luckey. Helsing is often described as Europe's answer to both, though its mix of software and increasingly its own hardware sets it on its own path. The democratic-values pitch is also where the company attracts criticism, since the same software that defends can also kill, and "for democracies" is a slogan, not a safeguard.
Helsing's core product was never a single app. It is a set of AI systems that ingest data from radars, cameras, electronic sensors, and weapons, then help operators understand a battlefield and act on it faster than an adversary can. The company's first major government work was on electronic warfare and battlefield situational awareness for the German and other European armed forces. [6]
Two named software systems anchor the platform. Altra is a reconnaissance-strike system that pulls together intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data from many drones and sensors, builds a shared picture, and lets a single human operator direct multiple strike drones, including in coordinated swarms. [7] Cirra is Helsing's electronic warfare AI. In December 2025, Helsing and Saab Germany signed a contract worth a three-digit-million-euro sum to integrate Cirra into the German Eurofighter's next-generation electronic warfare suite. Under that deal, Cirra is being integrated with Saab's Arexis sensor system over roughly three years, giving the Eurofighter AI-driven jamming, detection, and threat-classification capabilities. [8][9]
The underlying idea is that electromagnetic and sensor environments have become too fast and too cluttered for humans to parse alone. Helsing's software is meant to detect, classify, and react to threats in real time, including when communication links are jammed or cut. That last point matters in Ukraine, where heavy jamming has broken many remotely piloted systems.
Helsing's move into hardware is what turned it from an interesting software startup into a full defense manufacturer. The most prominent product is the HX-2, an electrically powered strike drone, often described as a loitering munition or one-way attack drone. It has an X-shaped wing layout with four electric propellers, a range of up to 100 kilometers, a top speed around 220 kilometers per hour in its terminal dive, and a payload of up to 4 kilograms that can be configured for anti-tank, anti-structure, or multi-purpose use. The system's total weight is roughly 12 kilograms. [10] What makes the HX-2 a "Helsing" product rather than a generic drone is the onboard AI: the company says it can find, re-identify, and engage targets even without a continuous data link, which is meant to make it resistant to electronic warfare. Multiple HX-2 units can also operate together as a swarm under the Altra software, controlled by one person. [10][7]
An earlier and cheaper drone, the HF-1, used a plywood fuselage and was produced in large numbers for Ukraine. [4]
To build these at scale, Helsing set up what it calls Resilience Factories, a distributed manufacturing model that lets individual nations produce drones locally rather than depend on a single plant. The first such site, RF-1 in southern Germany, was announced with an initial capacity of more than 1,000 HX-2 drones per month. [10]
Helsing has pushed well beyond small drones. In June 2025 it acquired Grob Aircraft, a German manufacturer of training and light aircraft, to gain real aerospace engineering and production capability. [11] Three months later, on 25 September 2025, it unveiled the CA-1 Europa, an autonomous uncrewed combat aircraft. The Europa is a full-size design study for a roughly four-tonne jet in the three-to-five-tonne class, capable of high subsonic speed, with a length near 11 meters, a wingspan near 10 meters, and a weapons capacity of about 500 kilograms. Helsing targets a first flight in 2027 and entry into service around 2029, and it positions the aircraft as Europe's entry into the collaborative combat aircraft category, jets that fly alongside or instead of crewed fighters. [11][12]
The aircraft's brain is Centaur, Helsing's AI agent designed to act as an autonomous fighter pilot. Centaur drew wide attention in mid-2025 when it flew a real Saab Gripen E. In flights over the Baltic Sea on 28 May and 3 June 2025, the human pilot handed control to Centaur, which then conducted beyond-visual-range air combat maneuvers against an opponent. Saab's chief innovation officer and test pilot Marcus Wandt, who flew the jet, called it "the future of air combat happening right now, in Europe." [13][14] The work was carried out under Sweden's Future Fighter concept studies for the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. Helsing has said Centaur accumulated the equivalent of a million flight hours of training in about 72 hours of simulation, a scale no human pilot could match. [13]
Helsing also went underwater. In 2025 it unveiled the SG-1 Fathom, an autonomous swarm-capable underwater glider that can stay submerged for up to 90 days while listening for ships and submarines. The Fathom is paired with Lura, an AI system that processes acoustic data to detect and classify vessels while making far less noise than active sonar. The combination is aimed at protecting undersea infrastructure and tracking Russian submarine activity, a growing concern in the North Sea and Baltic. [15][16]
Helsing has built a web of alliances with established defense and technology firms, which gives it access to platforms it does not make itself.
| Partner | Date | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Saab | 2023 onward | Investor and partner; Gripen E AI flights and Eurofighter Cirra electronic warfare integration [8][13] |
| Airbus | June 2024 | Framework agreement to develop the AI for Airbus's "Wingman" uncrewed combat aircraft concept [16] |
| Mistral AI | February 2025 | Joint work on vision-language-action models for defense platforms [17] |
| Loft Orbital | 2025 | AI for satellite constellations [4] |
| ARX Robotics | 2025 | Networked reconnaissance with ground robots [4] |
The Mistral AI partnership, announced at the Paris AI summit on 10 February 2025, pairs Europe's leading open-weight model lab with Europe's leading defense AI firm. The two said they would jointly develop vision-language-action models, systems that interpret sensor data, communicate with operators in natural language, and support real-time tactical decisions. [17] Not every partnership has lasted. An early tie-up with the German arms maker Rheinmetall, announced in 2022, ended in 2024. [16]
Ukraine has been both a customer and, in effect, a proving ground for Helsing's hardware. By early 2025 the company said it had thousands of HF-1 drones on the way to Ukraine and announced an agreement to produce 6,000 additional HX-2 strike drones for the country. [10] These deliveries are a big part of why Helsing's story moved so fast: a startup that wrote software in 2021 was, within four years, shipping attack drones into an active war.
The battlefield record has been contested. In January 2026, reports said Ukraine and Germany had paused further HX-2 orders after technical problems in field trials. According to Bloomberg, citing an internal German military presentation dated 20 November, some drones failed during takeoff testing, some units lacked AI-enabled terminal guidance and target acquisition, and the drones struggled with heavy jamming near the front that disrupted operator links. [18] Helsing disputed the account, saying it was unaware of the internal presentation, that it was too early to judge the HX-2's frontline performance, and that Ukrainian units had continued to express interest in the system. [18] The episode is worth holding lightly in either direction: front-line drone performance is hard to measure, both sides have incentives, and the public record is thin. It is a useful reminder that the gap between a polished product video and a muddy frontline can be wide.
Helsing has raised money at a pace that few defense companies, old or new, have matched. Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek has been central throughout: his investment vehicle Prima Materia led both the first major round in 2021 and the 2025 round, and Ek serves as Helsing's chairman. [2][19]
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation | Lead investor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Spring 2021 | about 8.5 million euros | not disclosed | early backers [5] |
| Series A | November 2021 | 102.5 million euros (Prima Materia put in 100 million) | not disclosed | Prima Materia (Daniel Ek) [19] |
| Series B | September 2023 | 209 million euros | not disclosed | General Catalyst [4] |
| Series C | July 2024 | 450 million euros | about 5 billion euros | General Catalyst, with Saab, Accel, Lightspeed, Plural, Greenoaks [20] |
| Series D | June 2025 | 600 million euros | about 12 billion euros | Prima Materia (Daniel Ek) [2] |
| Reported round | May 2026 | about 1.2 billion dollars (reported) | about 18 billion dollars (reported) | Dragoneer, with Lightspeed (reported, not officially confirmed) [3] |
The Series D, announced on 17 June 2025, more than doubled the company's valuation to roughly 12 billion euros and pulled in existing backers including Lightspeed, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst, and Saab, plus new investor BDT & MSD Partners. [2] Ek tied the raise to his sovereignty pitch, saying Europe faced "an urgent need for investments in advanced technologies that ensure its strategic autonomy." [2]
In May 2026, the Financial Times reported that Helsing was close to a new round of about 1.2 billion dollars at roughly an 18 billion dollar valuation, led by the US firm Dragoneer and co-led by existing investor Lightspeed, and that the round was oversubscribed several times over. [3] If completed at those terms, it would value Helsing around 30 percent higher in dollar terms than a year earlier and rank it among Germany's most valuable startups. As of this writing the round was reported rather than officially confirmed closed by the company, and despite the US leads, Helsing was described as remaining roughly 80 percent European-owned. [3]
Helsing's rise has not gone unquestioned. Beyond the 2026 Ukraine reports, an April 2025 Bloomberg article cited former employees and investors who raised concerns about overpriced drones and glitchy software, questioning how mature some of the technology really was. [21] More broadly, the company sits at the center of an ethical argument that European militaries and publics have only begun to have: how much autonomy to give weapons, how to keep meaningful human control, and whether "AI for democracies" is a principle or a marketing line. Helsing says a human stays responsible for lethal decisions. Critics counter that the direction of travel, toward faster, more autonomous engagement, makes that promise harder to keep over time. There is no tidy resolution here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.