Helsing

“And so I think the area of tanks is probably over.”

“And strike drones often travel over longer distances and like the HX-II, which is our drone quite often they're AI controlled.”

“Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end, so we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel you know, put in a hundred million euros of his ow…”

“We try really to keep the foot on the gas really aggressively, because we want to build a company that really matters, and we will never sell the company.”

“We came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recover that ability to interpret those radars, and it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against, you know, a l…”

“And this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program off record.”

“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”

“So, so we decided to acquire an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich, our outside Munich with its own runway hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities and build our own fighter jet, which is now called the CA-I and then put Centaur on it. As the cor…”

“We never set it up, honestly, to have the systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, which is what we have right now.”

“We had to go from dozens of HX-II per month to a baseline of 1000, and it can now search to In the small factory that we have to 3000 a month”

“If you look at something like the like the CA-I our autonomous fighter jets, it's designed in such a way that it can take off from any kind of makeshift airstrip, which would be a road, an autobahn, a motorway, a highway, et cetera.”

“We just closed a one billion framework contract in, in Germany”

“It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the founder backgrounds had already been in defense companies. Just much harder. It's easier to be an outsider.”

“Daniel might well get there with one of his companies, you know, Spotify, Helsing. I think those are two good options.”

“It's something that we work on. Yes, we have a robotics division that works with these partners.”

“We invested in Helsing. You know, Jeanette has seeded that, if you remember before, and we've invested that in all the rounds that they've raised since then. If you look at Andrel, same thing. We seeded that, and we invested in every round that they've raised …”

“I think we're the only firm that's invested in a defense prime in US, Europe, and India. We did Andrel, we did, you know, invested in Helsing, and we invested in a company called Rafi in India.”

“Helsing with this mission, its execution its access to capital, talent should be the company that gets disproportionate share of defense in Europe.”

“As a founder, the Investors you choose are so important. So of course it makes a huge difference. You know, if you're the founder of Helsing and you choose Daniel Eck, because Daniel Eck understands what long-term business building means, you know, and you don…”

“Torsten is, is the best, but in five years time, we look back and say, of course, Torsten couldn't have done it all by himself. There will be more, there will be others.”

“If you want to invest in the next Helsing, don't. Just invest in Helsing. I spend my life with investors who are like, oh, I'm trying to find the next OpenAI, the next Android. Don't. Just put your money in the winner.”

“So yeah, Spotify founder Daniel Eck is leading a six hundred million dollar funding round into the German defense tech startup Helsing. This is the, this is kind of more of an annual equivalent over in Europe valuing that four year old company at twelve billio…”

“Helsing is, is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence to produce its own drones, aircraft, and submarines as part of the bigger push for locally made and owned defense products for European countries and really companies all over the world.”

“A lot of sectors where I think we're going to be living in a, It's a tripolar world. Is that a word? Did I make it up? So there's gonna be an American version. Let's call it Android. There is a European version, Helsing, a Chinese version. Defense, space, ener…”

“It's funny you said there about like the Andrew of Europe, it's Helsing. And my favorite thing is when you see defense funds and you're like, no, no, I don't quite know if defense is quite the category. It's more like Andrew and Helsing.”

“When we started Helsing in March, 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China.”

“You can achieve a lot in particular around software with three to four exceptional people. And so we'd rather have a team of four exceptional people than eight good people. It makes everything easier. It's also cheaper, by the way, even though you pay above ma…”

“The people I work with are usually senior and don't need that much guidance. If I need a one-to-one with them every week, I think something's probably gonna, is probably going wrong.”

“I used to do them religiously, by the way, I just stopped doing them. It hasn't had a negative impact.”

“Well, I, I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, in, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.”

“You need to basically always have pressure on the pipeline of good people coming in, in order to be able to manage other people out, and so that you end up with a pool of people that are amazing.”

“So the seed was eight and a half million euros, but then we were lucky to have Daniel Ek and Prima Materia invest a hundred million euros about four months later or so.”

“And the second thing that allowed us to do is, is to not go for innovation you know, projects in defense for incubators and, you know, little grants here and there, but because we were quite well funded, we could go for programs of record. So the official larg…”

“I would say Helsing is a company that you can only co-found. You need to have multiple founders.”

“I think it's less than one percent.”

“We would have focused all of our efforts on specific systems to deal with the problems in hand, which were, which are now the ones that I talked about earlier. It's electronic warfare resistance, GPS independence you know, being resilient to comms jamming.”

“The pharma industry, if you think about innovators, they are basically a gigantic organization if it comes to distribution and regulation, but not invention. So, a big prime as Moloch in distributing because they have I have years and years of lobbying into th…”

“Oh, we love them. Like, good relationship with them. I hope they succeed. We've talked about, talked with them a couple times about potential collaborations.”

“When I look at European AI companies there's an increasing number of them that actually have the co-CEO structure, and often it's a very technical founder plus a more business-centric or business background founder, and so that's companies like Helsing Age, li…”

“My, certainly my best angel investment so far.”