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, in accordance with the Monetary Occasions. The deal makes it one in every of 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 yr in the past; now, it’s again with this even larger 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 yr to consider it as turning fashionable warfare into one thing that appears extra like a online game, besides with very actual penalties. The corporate’s foremost product takes large quantities of knowledge 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 selections based mostly on telephone calls and hand-drawn maps, everyone seems to be seeing the identical info, whether or not from a frontline trench or a command heart miles away.
However what began as an AI software program firm has grown way more formidable. Helsing is now constructing its personal strike drones and plane and stated it’s engaged on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines with a view to irmprove naval surveillance.
The timing isn’t coincidental. As American investor Eric Slesinger instructed TechCrunch this spring, “European governments waited approach 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 inquisitive 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, that means their capacity to deal with their very own safety. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis not too long ago 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 way 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 critical about constructing its personal protection tech ecosystem quite than counting on the U.S. for defense.
Ek, who first invested in Helsing again 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 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.
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