On 3 June 2025, a Saab Gripen E fighter jet flew a series of beyond-visual-range combat manoeuvres over the Baltic Sea with no human hand on the controls. The AI agent making the decisions, tracking targets through onboard sensors and manoeuvring against a human-piloted Gripen D, was Centaur, built by a four-year-old Munich startup called Helsing. The Swedish government co-funded the trials under Project Beyond. It was, by most accounts, the first time an AI had autonomously piloted a fully operational fighter jet.
That test flight captures something about Helsing that gets lost in the funding headlines. The company raised over $1.6 billion across eight rounds and reached a valuation of roughly €12 billion after its €600 million Series D in June 2025, led by Prima Materia with Lightspeed, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst, Saab and others. By that measure, it is Europe's most valuable defence startup. But the question most people in the industry still ask is what the company actually makes.
The answer is wider than the funding stories suggest. Helsing builds software and hardware across air, underwater and space, and the distance between what is already in production and what remains on paper matters for anyone evaluating the company, whether as a customer, investor or prospective employee.
From cancer scans to combat drones
Helsing's founding story is unusual even by startup standards. Gundbert Scherf was a McKinsey partner who had previously served as a special representative in the German Federal Ministry of Defence, where he helped create the military's first information domain service. Niklas Koehler was an ML researcher at Helmholtz Munich who had built AI systems to detect cancer in CT scans, and noticed that the same computer vision methods could detect drones. Torsten Reil had co-founded NaturalMotion from an Oxford biology PhD dropout, building motion synthesis software for games and films before selling to Zynga for $527 million in 2014, then co-founding Helsing in Munich in March 2021.
Four years later, the company employs roughly 664 people, plus around 275 from Grob Aircraft, a Bavarian composite aircraft manufacturer Helsing acquired in June 2025. Total headcount across the group is over 900.
The air domain is where Helsing has moved fastest, and where the picture is most complicated. The HX-2 is an electrically propelled X-wing strike drone designed as a precision loitering munition. It weighs roughly 12 kilograms, has a stated range of up to 100 kilometres and a maximum speed of 220 kilometres per hour. Its AI-enabled terminal guidance navigates using stored map data rather than GPS, which matters in environments where GPS is jammed. Multiple HX-2 units can fly as swarms controlled by a single operator through Helsing's Altra reconnaissance-strike software.
Helsing built a "Resilience Factory" (RF-1) in southern Germany with initial capacity to produce over 1,000 units per month, with plans to scale to 2,500. Ukraine ordered 10,000 across two tranches (4,000 of the earlier HF-1 variant and 6,000 HX-2). In February 2026, the Bundeswehr followed with initial orders of 4,300 HX-2 drones from Helsing and 2,200 Virtus drones from STARK Defence, worth a combined €536 million. The long-term framework agreements could originally have reached €4.3 billion for both companies, though Germany's parliamentary budget committee cut that combined ceiling to €2 billion.
But the HX-2's record in Ukraine is contested. In January 2026, Bloomberg reported that Ukraine and Germany had paused further orders after frontline testing problems. A Ukrainian document obtained by the German publication WELT showed the HX-2 hitting targets in five of 14 cases during one set of trials. Separately, tests by Ukraine's 1st Separate Centre for Unmanned Aviation Systems found that only 25 per cent of units successfully launched. Reports cited unstable video transmission, limited target acquisition and vulnerability to Russian electronic warfare.
Helsing disputed the findings, saying the HX-2 had been cleared for frontline use and was in Ukraine's central ordering system, with several hundred delivered per month. The company pointed to a unit that, after testing, requested more than 1,000 additional drones. The Bundeswehr contract, signed weeks after the reports emerged, suggests Berlin's confidence was not fundamentally shaken, though the parliamentary spending cap reflects caution.
The bigger air programmes are further out. The CA-1 Europa is an autonomous combat aircraft in the 3-5 ton class, unveiled in September 2025 at Grob Aircraft's site in Tussenhausen, Bavaria, after a 14-week technology study. HENSOLDT provides the sensor suite (radar, optronics, electronic warfare) and multi-domain data fusion through its MDOcore software, while Helsing contributes the Centaur AI agent. First flight is targeted for 2027, with Helsing aiming for service entry as early as 2029 and framing 2031 as the outer limit.
Helsing was also selected by Germany's federal procurement office BAAINBw, in a consortium with Schoenhofer Sales and Engineering (a Rohde and Schwarz company) and IBM Deutschland, to build the AI infrastructure for the Future Combat Air System sixth-generation fighter. Separately, with Saab Germany, Helsing is integrating AI-enhanced electronic warfare into 15 Luftwaffe Eurofighters, having completed the concept phase and moved into integration with Airbus Defence and Space. A framework agreement with Airbus covers AI for manned-unmanned teaming.
Beneath the surface and above the atmosphere
Helsing's underwater ambitions are less publicised but technically distinctive.
In May 2025, the company unveiled the SG-1 Fathom, an autonomous underwater glider. At just under two metres long, 28 centimetres in diameter and weighing 60 kilograms, it uses buoyancy changes rather than a propeller to glide at one to two knots. Each unit can patrol for up to three months and dive to 1,000 metres. The design is built for mass deployment: hundreds per mission, managed by a single operator from a Maritime Headquarters, at roughly 10 per cent of the cost of crewed anti-submarine warfare patrols.
The glider runs Lura, an AI platform built on what Helsing calls a "large acoustic model" trained on decades of acoustic data. According to Helsing, Lura detects signatures up to 10 times quieter than existing AI tools, classifies them up to 40 times faster than human operators and can distinguish individual submarines within the same class. By September 2025, Helsing had completed at-sea trials of the integrated SG-1/Lura system at the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre range off Scotland's west coast. The company also acquired Blue Ocean, an Australian autonomous underwater vehicle developer, to secure hardware manufacturing capability.
In space, Helsing is building two satellite constellations. One, with Loft Orbital, is a multi-sensor constellation for real-time intelligence with satellites launching in 2026. The other, with HENSOLDT and Norway's Kongsberg, is a sovereign European reconnaissance and surveillance constellation with a networked communications layer, targeted for operations by 2029.
What this means if you want to work there
Helsing's breadth is unusual for a company its age. Most four-year-old defence startups are still refining a single product. Helsing is building strike drones, a fighter-class autonomous aircraft, AI for existing fighter jets, underwater gliders, acoustic classification models and satellite constellations across three countries at the same time.
For engineers, that breadth translates into variety. Helsing lists 27 open roles on DefenceJobs.org, more than any other company among the roughly 500 European defence firms we track. The roles span Munich, London and Paris, covering embedded systems, ML engineering, simulation, robotics and full-stack software. The underwater and space programmes in particular suggest demand for signal processing, acoustic modelling and orbital systems expertise that few European defence companies can offer.
The risk profile is worth considering too. The HX-2 controversy shows that moving fast in defence means some products reach the battlefield before they are fully mature. The CA-1 Europa and both satellite constellations remain pre-operational. Helsing's ability to deliver on a product portfolio this wide, with a workforce still under 1,000, will determine whether the €12 billion valuation holds.
You can browse Helsing's open roles on DefenceJobs.org, or explore other German defence companies hiring now across our interactive company map.
