Spotify’s Daniel Ek just bet bigger on Helsing, Europe’s defense tech darling

Summary

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, as first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed separately by TechCrunch. 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.) Helsing declined to share further 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 flee...