Munich’s Helsing has raised $1.8bn at an $18bn valuation, making it Europe’s largest defence startup. The round is a bet on sovereign AI. A lot of the money paying for it is American.
Europe’s biggest defence startup just got a lot bigger. On Monday Helsing said it had closed a $1.8bn Series E that values the Munich company at $18bn.
The round was heavily oversubscribed. “Investor demand significantly exceeded the available allocation”, Helsing said in its statement. The numbers show it. The deal was first reported in May at $1.2bn. By the time it closed, it had grown to $1.8bn at the same $18bn valuation, as Tech Funding News noted. Investors put in half a billion dollars more without paying a cent more per share.
A very fast climb
Helsing was founded in 2021 by Gundbert Scherf, Torsten Reil and Niklas Köhler. It builds AI software and hardware for European militaries. Its systems fuse data from drones, radar, satellites and cameras into a single real-time picture, while leaving humans in charge of the decisions that matter.
