- Helsing has closed a $1.8bn Series E at an $18bn valuation. The round was first reported in May at $1.2bn, so it grew 50% larger without the price moving at all.
- Investor demand outstripped the available allocation, Helsing says.
- It’s the company’s third valuation jump in under two years: about €5B in 2024, €12B in 2025, now $18B.
Helsing’s Series E leaked in May at $1.2bn, as Tech Funding News reported at the time. By the time the Munich defence AI company confirmed the round, the check size had grown to $1.8bn, at the same $18bn valuation investors had agreed to two months earlier, as investors contributed larger amounts.
A round that increased in size
Helsing was founded in 2021 by Dr.Gundbert Scherf, Torsten Reil, and Niklas Köhler. It builds AI software and hardware for European militaries, including the Altra battlefield decision-support platform, the HX-2 loitering munition and the CA-1 Europa autonomous aircraft.
The company is based in Munich, with subsidiaries in Estonia, France and the UK, and has about 900 employees.
Dragoneer Investment Group leads the new round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners co-leading. Disruptive, Iconiq, the growth equity arm of Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorgan Chase, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, General Catalyst, Plural and Stepstone also joined as new backers.
Existing investors Prima Materia, Accel, and Greenoaks returned too, the same group that backed Helsing’s €600m Series D in June 2025, which valued the company at roughly €12bn.
Helsing says demand exceeded the available allocation, consistent with a round that grew by half without the price changing. That’s usually what oversubscription looks like when a company would rather widen the check size than test whether the market will pay more per share.
The board didn’t change. Daniel Ek and Tom Enders remain as co-chairs, alongside Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and General Denis Mercier, joining the company’s three founders.
European sovereignty meets American investment
Helsing says the money goes toward building and integrating new AI platforms across the defence systems of what it calls its growing number of partner nations. That’s the company’s pitch in a sentence: European governments buying sovereign AI instead of importing it.
It’s a pitch that gets harder to make cleanly when three of the biggest new checks in the round come from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and a Canadian pension fund. Helsing calls itself predominantly European-owned in the release, but doesn’t give a figure.
Co-CEO Torsten Reil put a number on it in May, telling reporters the company remained roughly 80% European-owned even with Dragoneer and Lightspeed leading the round, a figure worth asking Helsing to reconfirm after a round that’s grown by half a billion dollars since he said it.
For comparison, Anduril, Helsing’s closest American rival, raised $5 bilion in May at a $61 billion valuation, more than three times what Helsing is worth. In Europe, Quantum Systems and Tekever are the nearest comparisons, both a fraction of Helsing’s size, while newer entrants like France’s Harmattan AI are positioning themselves as regional alternatives.
The global military AI market was worth about $9.8bn in 2025 and is expected to reach $41.6bn by 2035, a 17.4% annual growth rate, with Europe the fastest-growing region on the back of NATO rearmament.
