Helsing raises $1.8bn at an $18bn valuation, and its cap table tells a story

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.

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The product list has widened fast. It now spans the Altra battlefield software, the HX-2 strike drone already supplied to Ukraine, the CA-1 Europa aircraft and underwater surveillance kit. The company has about 900 staff and offices in Germany, the UK, France and the Baltics.

The valuation has climbed just as quickly. Helsing was worth around €12bn when it raised €600m in June 2025. A year later it is worth $18bn. That is its third jump in under two years.

Sovereignty meets American money

Dragoneer led the round, with Lightspeed co-leading. The pitch is sovereignty: European governments buying home-grown defence AI rather than importing it from the United States.

The cap table complicates that story. Three of the largest new cheques come from JPMorgan Chase, the growth arm of Goldman Sachs and the Canada Pension Plan. Helsing calls itself “predominantly European-owned” but puts no figure on it. Co-chief executive Torsten Reil said in May the company was still about 80 percent European-owned. That was before the round grew by half a billion dollars.

Spotify’s Daniel Ek stays on as co-chair, alongside the former Airbus boss Tom Enders. Existing backers Prima Materia, Accel and Greenoaks all returned.

A crowded, cash-rich field

The money reflects a wider rush into European defence. Fellow German firm Quantum Systems raised $1.2bn at an $8bn valuation this month. Stark Defence took in €500m in June. NATO rearmament has turned battlefield AI into one of the continent’s hottest sectors.

Helsing still trails its American rival. Anduril raised $5bn in May at a $61bn valuation, more than three times what Helsing is worth. But the gap is the point. Europe wants a champion of its own, and the case for building sovereign capabilities has rarely been louder.

A cloud over the deal

Not everyone inside the company is celebrating. Days before the round, Helsing switched staff from a share-option scheme to a virtual one, Bloomberg reported. Under the new plan, employees get payouts tied to the share price but no direct equity, and the money is taxed as income.

Some staff sought legal advice on how to fight it. “VSOPs are rarely better for the employee”, one compensation expert told Bloomberg.

The switch followed a move to a European corporate structure, the kind of step companies often take before going public. On this trajectory, a listing is the obvious next stop. The open question is whether a company this reliant on American capital can keep calling itself Europe’s sovereign answer.