Helsing? Hell Yeah: In a week that has seen some big investments in defense tech (looking at you, Applied Intuition), we’ve got yet another heavy hitter: German AI and drone company Helsing announced Tuesday that they’ve raised $691M in a Series D funding round, valuing it at nearly $14B.
Did we mention that it’s only Tuesday?
Playing the game: Helsing—founded in 2021 by game developer Torsten Reil, former German defense official Gundbert Scherf, and machine learning engineer Niklas Köhler—has developed a few notable technologies, including:
- Altra: Land‑domain AI backbone that plugs into artillery, ISR drones, and mortar systems to stitch together battlefield data into a live target map
- HX‑2 AI Strike Drone: A loitering munition drone (human-in-the-loop by design) with a 62-mile range that is jam-resistant/EW-immune and swarm-capable when paired with Altra
- SG-1 + Lura: Autonomous underwater glider with multi-month endurance and an embedded acoustic AI system that detects subs and maps seafloor activity
- Centaur: AI co-pilot that recently flew live combat scenarios in Saab’s Gripen E fighter
The company has scored major contracts with European governments, including Germany and the UK. However, the company has faced criticism in recent months after Bloomberg reported that Helsing’s software had been “criticized by frontline soldiers and military experts as significantly more expensive and not as effective as comparable products.”
But it still looks like investors are all in.
Music to munitions: Helsing’s big raise was led by Prima Materia, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek’s deep-tech venture capital firm. Ek, in true Renaissance man fashion, is now Helsing’s chairman.
A quick breakdown of Helsing’s four-year path to European defense tech royalty:
- Series A: $120M from Ek’s Prima Materia (2021)
- Series B: $223M led by General Catalyst and Saab (2023)
- Series C: $487M led by General Catalyst, joined by Accel, Lightspeed, Plural, others (2024)
- Series D: $691M from Prima Materia and existing investors, plus BDT and MSD Partners
That new financing brings Helsing’s total raised capital to $1.6B. Zeitenwende, indeed.
Hold your horses: With the numbers out of the way, let’s look at how Helsing’s tech actually stacks up.
- Just last week, Helsing showcased some impressive capabilities in its Centaur AI-enabled Gripen E test flights with Saab.
- The company’s domestically produced HX-2 drones have been used by Ukraine’s military for some time now
But as is the case elsewhere in the defense tech world, not all that glitters is gold. Bloomberg found that industry players thought the company was both “excessively secretive about its product development” and “overly confident in public claims.” Some also expressed concern about “whether it can live up to its €5 billion valuation.”
With a big new influx of capital, Helsing presumably hopes to brush aside those concerns and live up to its new, slightly larger $14B valuation. If they don’t, expect another price hike for Spotify subscriptions.
Unperturbed: Ek is affirming his “commitment to empowering Europe’s technological sovereignty” with this big bet on Helsing—in particular, the future of AI in the battlespace.
“There’s an enormous realisation that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield,” Ek told the Financial Times. “We’re now at an inflection point…where we are going from a software company to an all-domain, AI software and hardware company.”