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When Daniel Ek isn’t busy running Spotify or building his new AI-driven health tech enterprise, he’s making massive bets on the future of European warfare, seemingly.
The billionaire, who primarily lives in Stockholm, just led a €600 million investment in Helsing, a four-year-old, Munich-based defense tech company that is now valued at €12 billion, according to the Financial Times. The deal makes it one of Europe’s most valuable privately held companies; it also highlights Europe’s scramble to build its own military muscle as the world grows messier and the U.S. turns inward.
The numbers help tell the story. Helsing raised $450 million just shy of a year ago; now, it’s back with this even bigger round led by Ek’s investment firm Prima Materia. It’s part of a broader defense tech boom that’s seeing money flood into companies like the U.S. giant Anduril, which just raised $2.5 billion led by Founders Fund, and European drone makers Quantum Systems and Tekever. (In recent weeks, they announced €160 million and €70 million, respectively, in rounds that put them both into so-called unicorn territory.)
TechCrunch has reached out to Helsing for more details about how it plans to use the new funding.
As for what, exactly, Helsing does, Wired said last year to think of it as turning modern warfare into something that looks more like a video game, except with very real consequences. The company’s main product takes massive amounts of data from military sensors, radars, and weapons systems, then uses AI to create intuitive, real-time visualizations of what’s happening on the battlefield. Instead of soldiers making life-or-death decisions based on phone calls and hand-drawn maps, everyone is seeing the same information, whether from a frontline trench or a command center miles away.
But what started as an AI software company has grown much more ambitious. Helsing is now building its own strike drones and aircraft and said it’s working on a fleet of unmanned mini submarines in order to irmprove naval surveillance.
The timing isn’t coincidental. As American investor Eric Slesinger told TechCrunch this spring, “European governments waited way too long to rethink what the arrangement on their own security meant.” The wake-up call came with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that Europe couldn’t rely on American protection alone. The U.S. election late last year of President Donald Trump — who is far more interested in advancing American interests — has since put a much finer point on things.
Now European leaders are talking about spending big on defense while achieving strategic autonomy, meaning their ability to handle their own security. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis recently summed up the movement in a separate interview with TechCrunch: “We’re going to spend a lot of money on defense as Europe. The defense landscape is changing, which is no longer just going to be about planes, tanks—this is all going to be much more digitally and AI driven.”
A couple of years ago, that realization was the impetus for the NATO Innovation Fund, the world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund backed by 24 NATO allies. But the capital pool is just one of several signs that Europe has grown serious about building its own defense tech ecosystem rather than relying on the U.S. for protection.
Ek, who first invested in Helsing back in 2021, before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, has perhaps seen for a while where thing are heading. As he said in a press release about Monday’s funding: “As Europe rapidly strengthens its defense capabilities in response to evolving geopolitical challenges, there is an urgent need for investments in advanced technologies that ensure its strategic autonomy.”
Other investors in Helsing’s new round include earlier backers Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst and Saab, and new investors BDT & MSD Partners. The company has now raised €1.37 billion altogether.
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