If Anduril is America’s defence-tech poster child, Helsing is the company Europe is building to answer it. In roughly five years the German firm has become the most valuable defence startup on the continent, worth around $18 billion, by selling AI software and, increasingly, the drones that software flies, into a Europe suddenly desperate to rearm. This is the third entry in our Company Profiles library of ones to watch, and the one where the tailwind is less about Silicon Valley ambition and more about a continent rediscovering that it has to defend itself.
The usual note: this is a business and investment profile of a company in a serious, ethically contested field. We cover the money, the record and the debate at the public level, and steer clear of the operational detail of any weapon.
The founders: a games scientist goes to war
Helsing was founded in 2021 by Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf and Niklas Köhler, and Reil’s background is the intriguing one. Before defence, he co-founded NaturalMotion, a company that used AI to animate lifelike movement in video games and film, which sold to the games giant Zynga for a reported $527 million. That lineage, teaching software to produce intelligent autonomous behaviour, is exactly what Helsing now applies to military systems. Scherf brought government and strategy experience; the combination is a founding team that can speak fluently to both engineers and defence ministries.
What Helsing actually builds
Helsing began as a software company: AI to fuse sensor data, improve battlefield decision-making and enhance existing weapons systems, with the explicit positioning of protecting European democracies. It has since moved into hardware. Its HX-2 is an AI-enabled strike drone, a loitering munition designed for mass production and high autonomy, reportedly used in Ukraine and priced to be built in volume. It is also developing Centaur, an AI system aimed at air combat, and underwater and maritime surveillance capabilities. The through-line is software-defined autonomy applied across domains, air, sea and the electromagnetic spectrum.
The European angle is the whole strategic story. As governments across the continent lift defence spending sharply in response to the war in Ukraine and doubts about the reliability of American security guarantees, Helsing is positioned as the sovereign European champion, the company that lets Europe field advanced autonomy without depending on US firms. That political tailwind is a large part of why investors have pushed its valuation to $18 billion.
| Helsing at a glance | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founders | Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf, Niklas Köhler |
| Founded | 2021 (Germany) |
| Latest valuation | ~$18bn (raised $1.8bn, up ~30% in under a year) |
| Core products | Defence AI software, HX-2 strike drone, Centaur AI pilot |
| Positioning | Europe’s sovereign defence-AI champion |
The ethics, said plainly
Helsing wraps its work in the language of defending democracies, and its supporters argue that a Europe that cannot deter aggression is a Europe that invites it. The objections are the field’s familiar ones, sharpened by the fact that Helsing builds strike drones and not only software: that autonomous lethality is a moral threshold, that mass-producible AI munitions lower the cost of war, and that noble founding language rarely survives contact with a global arms market. As with the others, this profile presents the debate rather than settling it, because the debate is precisely what a reader forming a view needs to weigh.
The investment case, even-handed
Helsing is private, so the question is how investors and analysts read it, and the split mirrors the wider sector. (None of this is investment advice.)
The bull case. Helsing sits in front of one of the strongest tailwinds in the market: a structural, multi-year increase in European defence spending, plus a political push for sovereign capability that a US firm cannot satisfy. Backers argue it is the natural European prime for the autonomy era, with real products, a war-driven demand signal, and a near-30% valuation rise in under a year that reflects genuine momentum rather than pure hype.
The bear case, deferred to the sceptics. The same authorities warning on the sector apply here. Fortune and others have argued the defence-tech boom is inflating into a bubble, with valuations priced on the same scarcity logic the Bank for International Settlements flagged in AI infrastructure. An $18 billion valuation on a five-year-old company is a bet that European rearmament translates into large, recurring orders for Helsing specifically, and European defence procurement is famously slow, fragmented across national governments, and prone to favouring incumbents. The tailwind is real; whether it reaches Helsing’s order book at the pace the valuation assumes is the open question.
The neutral read. Helsing has arguably the best macro story in this section, a whole continent rearming, and the hardest execution path, selling into dozens of separate, cautious national buyers. Watch the actual contract wins from European governments, whether HX-2 and Centaur move from Ukraine deployments and prototypes into standing national programmes, and whether the sovereignty argument converts into orders or stays a talking point. The politics point up; the procurement machinery is the test.
What this means
Helsing is the clearest way to bet that Europe’s rearmament is real and durable, and that the continent will insist on building its autonomy at home. It has serious products, a powerful political tailwind, and a valuation that assumes a fragmented, slow-moving customer base turns into a reliable one. That is a genuine and genuinely uncertain proposition, in a field whose ethics stay contested, which is exactly why it earns its place on a ones-to-watch list. Watch the government orders, not the mood music. (None of this is investment advice; do your own research, and speak to a professional for any serious sum.)
Related on Top Tool Stack: Anduril: the American benchmark · Shield AI: the AI pilot
Did you know: Helsing’s founder Torsten Reil previously built AI that animated video-game characters, selling that company to Zynga. The same lineage of teaching software lifelike autonomous behaviour now runs through Europe’s biggest defence startup.