Defense AI Startup Helsing Raises $487M Series C

Source: TechCrunch

Helsing creates AI software to process information from defense systems, boost weapons capabilities in drones and jet fighters, and improve battlefield decisions. Helsing has created a new entity in Estonia and plans to spend €70 million on Baltic defense projects over the next three years.

Gundbert Scherf, Helsing’s co-chief executive officer, said in an interview with TechCrunch that “Ukraine has used technology for its defense against the full-scale Russian invasion, and I think us being able to help there and deploy our technology and execute the mission we had set out three and a half years ago, to use AI to protect our democracies, has been a big driver for us.”

“We’re a company founded on European values and defending European interests and democracies, and right that now is happening in Ukraine,” he said, speaking about the move into Estonia. “But of course, it’s also happening on our eastern flank, all the way from Finland, through the Baltics, down to Poland … Estonia is a country that’s obviously also a leader in technology and the prime minister there has a high conviction in protecting European democracies. So it was a natural starting point.”

Asked where Helsing gets the bulk of its AI compute from, the company co-CEOs demurred on the details. Reil said: “We use our own compute obviously. We’re on ‘Edge’ devices, and there’s always local compute required as well. We also announced a few weeks ago Project Centaur, which is based on reinforcement learning to create an AI for air combat. That requires a lot of compute. So we spend a lot of money right now on training and training agents. Eventually, we’ll have extremely high capabilities in air combat. And there we use scaled-up compute.”

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