Helsing nears $1.2bn raise at $18bn valuation as capital floods Europe's defence tech

Helsing, the Munich-based maker of artificial-intelligence software and strike drones, is closing in on a funding round of about $1.2bn (roughly €1bn) that would value the five-year-old company at some $18bn, according to reporting by the Financial Times that was subsequently confirmed by Bloomberg and TechCrunch. The deal would make Helsing Germany's most valuable startup — and the clearest signal yet that Europe's rearmament has become the continent's defining investment story.

The round is led by San Francisco investment firm Dragoneer and co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, an existing backer, with people close to the deal telling the FT it was oversubscribed multiple times. The company has not formally announced a closing, and the timing had not been finalised when the raise was first reported in May. Even with two American firms at the front, Helsing remains roughly 80 per cent European-owned, according to the FT's reporting.

The new valuation marks a rise of about 30 per cent in dollar terms in barely a year. In June 2025, Helsing raised €600m at a €12bn valuation — then about $14bn — in a round led by Prima Materia, the investment vehicle of Spotify founder Daniel Ek, who chairs the company.

"As Europe rapidly strengthens its defence capabilities in response to evolving geopolitical challenges, there is an urgent need for investments in advanced technologies that ensure its strategic autonomy and security readiness," Ek said when that earlier round was announced.

From software startup to drone manufacturer

Founded in March 2021 by Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf and Niklas Köhler, Helsing began as a defence-software company and has expanded aggressively into hardware. Its portfolio now spans the HX-2 electric strike drone, the HF-1 loitering munition — thousands of which have been delivered to Ukraine under German funding — the SG-1 Fathom autonomous underwater glider, and the CA-1 Europa unmanned combat aircraft, targeted for a first flight in 2027. The company acquired aircraft builder Grob in 2025 and ground-robotics firm Keybotic in January 2026.

Government orders are following the capital. In February, Germany's defence ministry awarded strike-drone contracts to Helsing and its Berlin-based rival Stark, part of what Defense News described as a once-reluctant Berlin going "big" on one-way attack drones. In May, Helsing and Bremen space group OHB formed a joint venture, KIRK, to build AI-based satellite reconnaissance and targeting systems for European forces.

"The war in Ukraine demonstrates how important space-based targeting is. It also shows that we have no time to lose and must deliver integrated defence systems in space – systems whose performance is built on software capabilities – as quickly as possible," Scherf, Helsing's co-chief executive, said at the venture's launch.

The rearmament economy

The money chasing Helsing reflects a policy shift of historic scale since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At NATO's summit in The Hague in June 2025, allies committed to spend 5 per cent of GDP annually on defence and security by 2035 — 3.5 per cent on core military requirements and up to 1.5 per cent on infrastructure, resilience and the defence industrial base, with the trajectory to be reviewed in 2029.

The European Union, meanwhile, aims to mobilise up to €800bn under its ReArm Europe plan, rebranded Readiness 2030, including the €150bn SAFE loan instrument for joint procurement that member states adopted in May 2025. National budget rules have been loosened specifically to accommodate defence spending.

Venture capital changes sides

Private investors have moved just as fast. European defence, security and resilience startups raised a record $8.7bn in venture capital in 2025, up 55 per cent year on year and nearly four times the level of five years earlier, according to a February report by Dealroom and the NATO Innovation Fund. Artificial intelligence underpinned 44 per cent of that funding, and Munich — Helsing's home — ranked as Europe's leading hub, with $7bn raised since 2020.

• Quantum Systems, the Bavarian reconnaissance-drone maker, raised €180m in November 2025 at a valuation above €3bn.
• Stark, founded barely two years ago, raised €500m led by Sequoia and Founders Fund at a valuation above €3.5bn.
• Helsing's closest US analogue, Anduril, has been valued above $60bn in investor discussions — a gap European investors are betting will narrow.

Public lenders are reinforcing the trend. The European Investment Bank, the EU's Luxembourg-based financing arm, quadrupled its security and defence lending to €4bn in 2025 — about 5 per cent of its financing inside the Union, a threshold it had originally planned to reach only in 2026 — within a record €100bn overall financing ceiling renewed for this year. Since 2024 the bank has repeatedly widened its lending rules, extending them to purely military investment.

For Europe's markets, the implications reach beyond one company. A sector that venture funds shunned only five years ago on ethical and mandate grounds now absorbs a growing share of the continent's risk capital, talent and industrial policy. Whether Helsing's $18bn price tag proves prescient or frothy, the direction of travel is no longer in question: as long as governments keep their spending pledges, defence has become Europe's growth trade.