Torsten Reil spent his twenties teaching digital bodies how to fall over.
He was a biologist at Oxford, working on how living things move, and from that research he built NaturalMotion, a company whose software made video-game characters stumble and recover like real people. Zynga bought it in 2014. For most founders that would have been the end of the story. Reil, who also studied evolutionary systems at Sussex, was only getting to the question that actually bothered him.
The pitch was plain: AI would decide who sees the battlefield first, and Europe was not building it.
That year Russia annexed Crimea. Reil has said it was part of what pushed him toward defence. In the same years, across the table in Berlin, a McKinsey partner named Gundbert Scherf was serving as a Special Representative at the German defence ministry, from 2014 to 2016. One man understood machine learning and the other understood how a ministry buys things.
What almost nobody outside the trade noticed was the third piece. Niklas Köhler, a physicist, had started a deep-learning company called Hellsicht in 2017. When the three founded Helsing in Munich in March 2021, that small company was folded in. The pitch was plain: AI would decide who sees the battlefield first, and Europe was not building it. Scherf later put it this way in a funding announcement, saying AI would be crucial for democracies to defend their values.
The cheque that made it real came in November 2021, about €100m from Prima Materia, the vehicle of Spotify founder Daniel Ek, who now chairs the company. It was a strange sight, a music-streaming billionaire funding weapons software, and it cost him. Musicians pulled their catalogues from Spotify in protest, in 2021 and again in 2025.
The company grew faster than its critics could count. It reached a €1.7bn valuation in 2023, the first European defence unicorn, then €12bn in 2025. It supplied 4,000 HX-2 drones to Ukraine, bought the aircraft maker Grob, flew an AI pilot named Centaur in a Swedish Gripen jet, and unveiled an autonomous combat aircraft. In July 2026 it raised about US$1.8bn at an US$18bn valuation.
The price has been trust. Rheinmetall, an early partner, walked away in 2024 and sided with a rival. In April 2025 Bloomberg reported that former employees, investors and military experts alleged overpriced drones and shaky software. Some industry voices call the company secretive. Helsing keeps certain production sites quiet, saying it fears Russian sabotage.
Reil's path is an odd one: from teaching animated characters to fall, to building machines that decide in a split second. The lesson for a founder is not about weapons. It is that an exit can be a rehearsal. The skills he sold in 2014 were the ones that let him walk into defence a decade later with something to offer.