Helsing's Bet: Change Defense From the Inside

Silicon Valley has spent decades telling us that disruption means replacement.

A new technology company arrives, finds an old industry that seems slow and inefficient, builds a better alternative, and eventually takes over part of the market.

It is easy to imagine defense following the same path.

A venture-backed startup could build cleaner software, move faster than traditional defense contractors, and eventually replace some of the systems that took decades to develop.

Then came Helsing.

Who Founded Helsing?

Helsing was founded in 2021 by three people who came from remarkably different backgrounds: Torsten Reil, Gundbert Scherf, and Niklas Köhler. Today, all three remain among the company's founders, with Reil and Scherf serving as co-CEOs and Köhler as President and Chief Product Officer.

Helsing was not created by a group of traditional defense contractors.

Torsten Reil came from software and simulation. He founded NaturalMotion, a company known for simulation and animation technology used in games and film. NaturalMotion was later acquired by Zynga for $527 million.

After NaturalMotion, Reil did not initially plan to build another company. He spent time investing in startups instead. Then, around 2020–2021, he met Gundbert Scherf in Berlin.

Scherf came from a very different world. He had worked at the German Ministry of Defence and later at McKinsey, where he focused on aerospace and defense. He understood how military institutions, procurement, and governments actually worked.

The third founder, Niklas Köhler, came from artificial intelligence and machine learning. His previous work included AI applications in healthcare, where machines had to interpret complex visual and sensor information.

So the founding team was unusual.

One had built software and simulation technology. One understood defense institutions. One specialized in AI.

That combination became the foundation of Helsing.

They came together around a simple idea: modern defense was becoming increasingly dependent on software, but much of the defense industry was still organized around hardware.

And that created an opening.

Old Defense Has the Platforms. New Defense Has the Software.

Building a modern fighter jet, armored vehicle, radar system, or missile platform is fundamentally different from building software.

Hardware requires factories, specialized engineering, testing, supply chains, certification, and enormous amounts of capital. Some defense companies have spent decades building that industrial foundation.

Companies such as Rheinmetall and Saab already possess capabilities that a software startup cannot simply recreate.

So Helsing did not need to start by replacing them.

It could build something on top of what already existed.

That is a fundamentally different strategy from the classic Silicon Valley model of disruption.

Instead of saying, "The old system is obsolete. Let's build a new one," Helsing's approach was closer to:

"What if the existing system could become much more capable with better software?"

That idea appears clearly in Helsing's partnerships.

With Rheinmetall, Helsing has worked on software-based defense systems and the integration of AI with existing land platforms.

With Saab, Helsing formed a strategic partnership that included a €75 million investment for a 5% stake.

With HENSOLDT, Helsing is working on the CA-1 Europa autonomous combat aircraft, combining Helsing's Centaur AI with radar, optronics, electronic warfare sensors, and other systems.

The hardware does not disappear.

The software becomes more important.

From Software Startup to Defense Technology Company

But there is an interesting twist.

Helsing is no longer simply a software company.

The company now develops software, AI systems, autonomous platforms, strike drones, aircraft, and manufacturing capabilities.

One example is the HX-2, an AI-enabled strike drone designed for mass production and operation in heavily contested environments.

Another is Altra, Helsing's reconnaissance and strike software platform, which connects information from different sensors and systems and helps coordinate effects on the battlefield.

Helsing has also moved further into autonomous aircraft with the CA-1 Europa and its electronic attack variant.

This expansion is reflected in the company's valuation. In July 2026, Helsing announced a $1.8 billion Series E funding round that valued the company at $18 billion.

The interesting part is not simply that Helsing became more valuable.

It is what the company is becoming.

Imagine a reconnaissance system detecting a target.

Something has to interpret that information, connect it with other data, determine what matters, and get that information to a system capable of acting on it.

That is where software becomes more than a supporting tool.

It becomes the layer connecting information to action.

A Defense Stack Is Starting to Emerge

Put Helsing next to companies such as Palantir and ARX Robotics, and a pattern starts to emerge.

This is not a strict division of the defense industry. These companies overlap, and each operates across multiple layers.

But conceptually, their strengths can be viewed differently.

Palantir is heavily focused on data, intelligence, and decision infrastructure.

Helsing pushes AI closer to the operational and tactical edge, where information has to become a decision and eventually an action.

ARX Robotics focuses more directly on the physical ground domain, developing unmanned systems that can operate alongside human forces.

You can think of the emerging stack as:

Data → Decisions → Machines → Action

The boundaries are not clean.

Palantir can operate close to the tactical edge. Helsing operates across multiple domains and levels of warfare. ARX also develops software, not just physical machines.

But the direction is interesting.

The connection between software and the physical battlefield is becoming increasingly tight.

Helsing and ARX Robotics have already partnered to develop an AI-based reconnaissance and strike network for European defense.

If you want to see how ARX approached the battlefield from the hardware and autonomy side, I wrote about its founders and origin story here:

How Three German Soldiers Built ARX Robotics for the Battlefield

The interesting part is not simply that two defense startups are working together.

It is that the boundary between the software layer and the physical battlefield is becoming thinner.

The Cost of Becoming the Layer

But there is a cost to this strategy.

The deeper a startup becomes embedded in military systems, the more valuable it can become.

But it also becomes more dependent on the institutions, procurement processes, hardware platforms, and governments that it originally set out to change.

That creates an interesting paradox.

A startup can gain influence not by defeating the existing system, but by becoming indispensable to it.

The more deeply its software is integrated into military operations, the harder it becomes to separate the company from the system.

At that point, the startup is no longer simply an outsider challenging the defense industry.

It is becoming part of the defense industry itself.

When the Startup Becomes Part of the System

Maybe the most interesting question about Helsing is therefore not whether a startup can defeat an established defense contractor.

It may not need to.

A company does not necessarily need to own the aircraft, tank, radar, or drone to influence how that system operates.

It may be enough to control the software layer that connects information, decisions, and action.

Helsing began with a software-first approach.

It partnered with companies that already had the hardware and industrial infrastructure.

Then it began developing its own autonomous systems.

Now it is moving across software, AI, hardware, manufacturing, and military integration.

That makes Helsing something harder to categorize.

It is no longer simply a software startup.

But it is not a traditional defense contractor either.

It is becoming a company that sits between the two.

And that may be the real bet behind Helsing.

The company may prove that disruption does not always require replacement.

Sometimes, the more powerful strategy is to become part of the system you originally wanted to change.

Who Controls the Next Battlefield?

So who controls the next generation of warfare?

The company that builds the machine?

The company that writes the software?

Or the company that connects them?

The answer may depend less on who builds the most powerful weapon and more on who controls the layer where decisions become action.