When Daniel Ek isn’t busy operating Spotify or constructing his new AI-driven well being tech enterprise, he’s making large bets on the way forward for European warfare, seemingly.
The billionaire, who primarily lives in Stockholm, simply led a €600 million funding in Helsing, a four-year-old, Munich-based protection tech firm that’s now valued at €12 billion, as first reported by the Monetary Occasions and confirmed individually by TechCrunch. The deal makes it considered one of Europe’s most dear privately held corporations; it additionally highlights Europe’s scramble to construct its personal army muscle because the world grows messier and the U.S. turns inward.
The numbers assist inform the story. Helsing raised $450 million simply shy of a yr in the past; now, it’s again with this even greater spherical led by Ek’s funding agency Prima Materia. It’s a part of a broader protection tech growth that’s seeing cash flood into corporations just like the U.S. large Anduril, which simply raised $2.5 billion led by Founders Fund, and European drone makers Quantum Techniques and Tekever. (In current weeks, they introduced €160 million and €70 million, respectively, in rounds that put them each into so-called unicorn territory.)
Helsing declined to share additional particulars about the way it plans to make use of the brand new funding.
As for what, precisely, Helsing does, Wired stated final yr to consider it as turning trendy warfare into one thing that appears extra like a online game, besides with very actual penalties.
The corporate’s most important product takes large quantities of information from army sensors, radars, and weapons programs, then makes use of AI to create intuitive, real-time visualizations of what’s taking place on the battlefield. As an alternative of troopers making life-or-death choices primarily based on telephone calls and hand-drawn maps, everyone seems to be seeing the identical data, whether or not from a frontline trench or a command heart miles away.
However what began as an AI software program firm has grown far more formidable. Helsing is now constructing its personal strike drones and plane and stated it’s engaged on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines so as to enhance naval surveillance.
The timing isn’t coincidental. As American investor Eric Slesinger advised TechCrunch this spring, “European governments waited means too lengthy to rethink what the association on their very own safety meant.” The wake-up name got here with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that Europe couldn’t depend on American safety alone. The U.S. election late final yr of President Donald Trump — who is much extra enthusiastic about advancing American pursuits — has since put a a lot finer level on issues.
Now European leaders are speaking about spending large on protection whereas attaining strategic autonomy, which means their skill to deal with their very own safety. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis lately summed up the motion in a separate interview with TechCrunch: “We’re going to spend some huge cash on protection as Europe. The protection panorama is altering, which is not simply going to be about planes, tanks—that is all going to be far more digitally and AI pushed.”
A few years in the past, that realization was the impetus for the NATO Innovation Fund, the world’s first multi-sovereign enterprise capital fund backed by 24 NATO allies. However the capital pool is only one of a number of indicators that Europe has grown severe about constructing its personal protection tech ecosystem relatively than counting on the U.S. for defense.
Ek, who first invested in Helsing again in 2021, earlier than the outbreak of the Ukraine struggle, has maybe seen for some time the place factor are heading. As he stated in a press launch about Monday’s funding: “As Europe quickly strengthens its protection capabilities in response to evolving geopolitical challenges, there’s an pressing want for investments in superior applied sciences that guarantee its strategic autonomy.”
Different traders in Helsing’s new spherical embody earlier backers Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, Normal Catalyst and Saab, and new traders BDT & MSD Companions. The corporate has now raised €1.37 billion altogether.
