Helsing, the five-year-old Munich startup building AI drones and battlefield software, widely cast as Europe’s answer to America’s Anduril, is on the cusp of closing a $1.2bn round at an $18bn valuation. The lead investor is American and the round is on track to be the largest ever for a European defence startup. The point the company keeps making: it stays roughly 80% European-owned.
That instinct — reach to America for scale, insist on European sovereignty — runs right through Helsing. Our latest Zeki Diagnostic finds it playing out one layer beneath the cap table, in the thing that actually builds the drones: the talent.
Because on the numbers, Helsing hires better than Anduril. Better than Shield AI. Better than everyone in European defence-tech. That is not a slogan. It is what the data says. On our weighted engineering composite, Helsing tops a field of eight — ahead of both American giants and every European rival.
Dig into why, and it gets more surprising. Helsing has the highest PhD density in the field — more than double most rivals. It draws AI talent from Amazon, Meta and Google at a scale no other European firm comes close to: 10% of its people have passed through a Magnificent Seven company, against roughly 2% for its European peers. Its most senior researchers out-rank the top benches at Anduril and Shield AI.
So here’s the twist.
The thing that built Helsing is now the thing that limits it.
Helsing hired brilliantly in Europe. But the deepest pool of defence and big-tech engineering talent on earth sits in the United States — and Helsing has barely touched it. Fewer than 2% of its technical workforce is US-based. Anduril and Shield AI recruit straight from Northrop, Lockheed, SpaceX and Tesla. Helsing, for now, can’t.
And the clock is ticking, because its home-grown hiring engine is slowing down.
Helsing — five years old, Europe’s defence-tech darling — is now growing its own headcount at roughly the pace of Tekever, a company founded two decades earlier. The younger insurgents are sprinting. Helsing is not.
Workforce growth at defense tech companies grew rapidly in 2025, irrespective of the level of maturity of the company, reflecting major capital infusion and, in some cases, revenue generation that has enabled increased hiring. Based on the assumption that each company fills its current open roles in the next six months, Harmattan AI, ARX Robotics, and STARK will increase their workforces the most rapidly in 2026, with Anduril Industries and Shield AI also maintaining very high levels of workforce growth even as their companies mature.
Then there’s the hardware problem, and it may be the most revealing finding of all. Helsing’s pivot into drones and manufacturing wasn’t staffed by patient recruiting. It was staffed by scavenging two collapsing eVTOL companies — Lilium and Volocopter — and buying firms outright. That well has now run dry. With open roles split evenly between software and hardware engineers, the maths says Helsing won’t close its hardware gap organically. Watch for more acquisitions.
The one question worth underwriting
Helsing is chasing its monster round on a sovereign-European thesis — while reaching across the Atlantic for the capital to fund it. Our data says the talent base faces the identical dilemma. The deepest pool sits in the US, where American investors already supply close to half of Europe’s defence-tech funding, and the US has taken the overwhelming majority of NATO defence VC since 2019. Capital and engineers pool in the same place.
The bull case rests on execution — and execution is a hiring problem before it is anything else. As TechCrunch put it, plenty of well-funded defence startups never bridged the gap between the demo and the battlefield. Helsing’s engineering bench is world-class. Whether it can extend that bench into the United States, at speed, is on our reading the single variable that decides what an $18bn price tag is really worth.
The full Zeki Diagnostic names the researchers who’ve left and where they went, decodes the US and APAC signals buried in the open-roles data, and maps the exact pipelines that got Helsing this far. Those are the parts we’re keeping between the covers.
Sources:
Financial Times, via Bloomberg — German drone startup may see $18b valuation in fundraising:
TechCrunch — Daniel Ek-backed defense tech Helsing to raise $1.2B at $18B valuation
Dealroom × NATO Innovation Fund — State of Defence Tech 2025
Header image courtesy of Helsing.ai