Helsing raised $1.8 billion at an $18 billion valuation, the Munich-headquartered defense-AI startup said Monday, in a round that pushes it firmly into the top tier of Europe's private defense companies. JPMorgan Chase joined venture funds Lightspeed Venture Partners and Iconiq as new and existing backers. The company said investor demand significantly exceeded the available allocation.
The valuation triples the profile of a company that until recently was known primarily inside European defense circles. Helsing builds drones, underwater surveillance systems, and the autonomy and AI software that runs on them — a hardware-plus-software stack pitched as a European answer to US defense-AI incumbents.
The comparison the market is making is with Anduril, which raised $5 billion at a $61 billion valuation in May 2026. Helsing is now roughly a third of Anduril's mark by valuation on a fresh round less than half the size — a gap that reflects Anduril's longer runway and larger US defense contract base, but also how quickly European capital is catching up on defense-AI multiples.
Key facts
- 01Helsing raised $1.8 billion at an $18 billion valuation, with JPMorgan Chase, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Iconiq among the investors.
- 02The round follows US rival Anduril's $5 billion raise at a $61 billion valuation in May 2026.
- 03Helsing's HX-2 drones are already being supplied to the Ukrainian army; its CA-1 Europa drone was on display at ILA Berlin.
- 04The company said it remains predominantly European-owned, positioning itself as a sovereign European defense-AI champion.
- 05Helsing said investor demand significantly exceeded the available allocation in the round.
Helsing's HX-2 drones are being supplied to the Ukrainian army, giving the company a rare thing in defense procurement: a combat-tested product line with a named end user. Its CA-1 Europa drone was displayed at the International Aerospace Exhibition at Berlin ExpoCenter Airport, part of a broader push to sell into NATO-country militaries beyond the Ukraine pipeline.
The company leaned hard on European sovereignty in its announcement. "The company remains predominantly European-owned, underscoring its deep roots in Europe," Helsing said, a message aimed squarely at defense ministries wary of dependence on US-controlled autonomy stacks. It's also a message aimed at European regulators and procurement officers who have been under political pressure to buy local since 2022.
The fundraising climate for defense AI has shifted sharply. Alongside Anduril's $5 billion round, US peers Shield AI and autonomous shipbuilder Saronic have raised at rising valuations, and private-market capital that once avoided weapons manufacturers is now competing to get into the category. JPMorgan's participation as a lead-tier investor in Helsing is itself a signal — large banks joining defense-tech cap tables was unusual as recently as two years ago.
Helsing said the round will "accelerate Helsing's mission to develop and integrate entirely new AI platforms into the defense capabilities of its growing number of partner nations." In practice, that money goes toward three places: expanding drone production capacity, hiring autonomy and AI engineers against a scarce talent pool, and building out software integrations for partner-nation defense systems.
The risks are real. Defense-AI valuations are being set in an environment shaped by the war in Ukraine and elevated European defense budgets; a shift in either could compress multiples quickly. Export controls, ITAR-adjacent restrictions, and end-use scrutiny will only tighten as autonomous weapons deploy more widely. And Anduril's $61 billion mark shows how much further US incumbents can pull ahead if European procurement stays fragmented across national buyers.
For the AI market, the Helsing round confirms that defense is now a first-class buyer of applied AI, not a niche adjacent to it. The autonomy, computer vision, and edge-inference work happening inside companies like Helsing and Anduril is drawing engineers, capital, and compute at the same tier as the frontier labs. An $18 billion European defense-AI valuation, funded by JPMorgan and top-tier venture capital, is the clearest signal yet that the category has crossed from strategic curiosity into mainstream growth investing.
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