When Daniel Ek isn’t busy operating Spotify or constructing his new AI-driven health tech enterprise, he’s making huge 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, in keeping with the Monetary Instances. The deal makes it one in all Europe’s most precious privately held firms; 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 12 months 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 firms just like the U.S. big Anduril, which simply raised $2.5 billion led by Founders Fund, and European drone makers Quantum Methods and Tekever. (In current weeks, they introduced €160 million and €70 million, respectively, in rounds that put them each into so-called unicorn territory.)
TechCrunch has reached out to Helsing for extra particulars about the way it plans to make use of the brand new funding.
As for what, precisely, Helsing does, Wired stated final 12 months to think about it as turning trendy warfare into one thing that appears extra like a video game, besides with very actual penalties.
The corporate’s principal product takes huge quantities of knowledge from army sensors, radars, and weapons programs, then makes use of AI to create intuitive, real-time visualizations of what’s occurring on the battlefield. As a substitute 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 middle 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 to be able to irmprove naval surveillance.
The timing isn’t coincidental. As American investor Eric Slesinger told TechCrunch this spring, “European governments waited manner 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 12 months of President Donald Trump — who is much extra keen on advancing American interests — has since put a a lot finer level on issues.
Now European leaders are speaking about spending massive on protection whereas reaching strategic autonomy, that means their means to deal with their very own safety. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis just 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 now 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 quite than counting on the U.S. for defense.
Ek, who first invested in Helsing back in 2021, earlier than the outbreak of the Ukraine battle, 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 may be an pressing want for investments in superior applied sciences that guarantee its strategic autonomy.”
Different buyers in Helsing’s new spherical embrace earlier backers Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, Normal Catalyst and Saab, and new buyers BDT & MSD Companions. The corporate has now raised €1.37 billion altogether.