The Ledger, every show

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“Because you need to do both, clearly. You know, you're always out-competed by someone who works smart and hard, if you're a work smart, not hard person.”

“And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front, ah, to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones.”

“The US had companies like Andrew and Palantir that were very forward looking defense companies with a big focus on, AI, cheaper hardware, and abundant hardware and the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing, and so we felt we have to do this”

“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 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…”

“It's also the country that has in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty two billion euros last year to originally, I think, hundred and fifty three billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over one hundred and …”

“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”

“In order for that not to dominate everything else, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is, is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try And, you know, use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to. And…”

“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.”

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

“I think it is, so, I mean, I'm biased, but I think it is around those companies that have got to scale, that have programs of record, and that are basically active in a conflict.”

“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.”

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

“So then we started a long collaboration with Rockstar Games, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Redemption, and a whole range of other games.”

“We ended up using it in, and licensing it for visual effects in big Hollywood movies, like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, then for big video games like GTA IV, GTA V Max Payne and many others”

“Look at Poland, Poland has gone from, I think, 2.1% or so to 4.7 within just a few years.”

“Iran is producing a large number of drones already. They've been you know, using and working on the Shahad, for example, for a long time. They've licensed that design to Russia. Russia is now manufacturing it itself.”