Helsing just raised $1.8 billion at an eye watering $18 billion valuation. 

That's what investors now think Munich's defense-AI company is worth, a 50% jump from the €12 billion mark it carried just thirteen months ago, and the largest venture round any European defense startup has ever closed.

The July 13 Series E was oversubscribed. Dragoneer, Lightspeed, Disruptive, Iconiq, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorgan Chase, and CPP Investments all wrote checks, joined by returning backers Prima Materia, Accel, and Greenoaks. Goldman and a Canadian pension fund buying into autonomous weapons manufacturing is itself the story on a slower news week.

But this wasn't a slower news week.

The round landed inside a run of announcements: a West Virginia manufacturing facility the next day, a French warhead partnership in June, an OHB space joint venture before that. Helsing is moving fast, and the market is pricing it like the winner is already decided.

I don't think it is. Not yet. The same drone at the center of this valuation story is also the subject of a fight over whether it actually works in Ukraine. More on that shortly.

Torsten Reil didn't start in weapons. He started in ragdoll physics.

His first company, NaturalMotion, built the animation engine that made bodies fall convincingly in video games, the tech behind the twitchy, physics-driven deaths in Grand Theft Auto IV. Zynga bought it for $527 million in 2014. A decade later, Reil is co-CEO of Europe's most valuable defense startup.

He didn't build it alone. Dr. Gundbert Scherf spent years as a McKinsey partner before becoming a special advisor inside Germany's Federal Ministry of Defense, where he helped stand up the Bundeswehr's first cyber unit. Niklas Köhler came from Helmholtz Zentrum München, where he trained machine learning models to spot tumors, not tanks. One founder who knew how to move fast, one who knew the ministry, one who knew the math. That's Helsing in three people.

They founded the company in Munich in March 2021. Five months later, Daniel Ek's Prima Materia led a €102.5 million Series A and the Spotify billionaire took a board seat he still holds, now as co-chairman alongside former Airbus CEO Tom Enders.

Helsing began with three heavy hitting founders and a solid prediction of the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine. Torsten rarely does interviews, but on the 20VC podcast he revealed this part of their origin story: 

Helsing started as pure software: sensor fusion, electronic warfare, code meant to sit on top of hardware other people built. But then Russia invaded Ukraine and Germany declared its Zeitenwende, which is when Helsing pivoted building the hardware itself.

What has since follow has been a meteoric rise in fundraising and valuations. €209 million Series B in September 2023. €450 million Series C the following July. €600 million Series D last June, at a €12 billion mark. Thirteen months later: $18 billion.

So what, if anything, supports this historic funding cycle? Sign up for The Merge Premium and keep reading below to find out..