Spotify’s Daniel Ek Leads €600 Million Funding Round For Defense Startup Helsing

Spotify’s founder, Daniel Ek, is leading a €600 million investment round in the German defense startup Helsing. The new investment makes Helsing one of the most valuable startups in Europe.

According to the Financial Times, the German unicorn is transitioning from developing only AI technologies for defense to building its own drones, submarines, and aircraft.

Ek, the Swedish entrepreneur who is also developing and expanding his latest startup Neko Health, is betting on Helsing through his investment company Prima Materia—founded in 2020—for the second time.

Prima Materia invested in Helsing in 2021 and is now “doubling down” to help the defense company expand its product portfolio. Other investors, such as Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Ventures, and Plural, also participated in the funding round.

The four-year-old company has now raised a total of €1.37 billion and has been valued at €12 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Ek explained that current conflicts—such as the war between Russia and Ukraine—have heightened awareness and accelerated the need for AI-powered military systems, which are being deployed at scale for the first time.

“There’s an enormous realization that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield,” said Ek to the Financial Times. “We can’t understate the implications of that for this conflict [in Ukraine] or really any conflict going forward.”

Helsing has already sold thousands of drones fabricated in Germany to Ukraine and has established partnerships with Sweden, the UK, and Germany— and the Swedish defence group Saab.

The company has not disclosed how it plans to use the new funding.

Helsing is not the only tech company partnering with governments to provide advanced AI technologies this week. On Monday, the U.S. Defense Department awarded OpenAI a $200 million contract to develop AI technologies for national security.