Helsing is perhaps one of the buzziest — and more mysterious — startups on investors’ and governments’ radars right now. The Munich-based AI battlefield software company, founded in 2021, has raised more than $820m to date, per PitchBook. Its Series C round, announced in July this year, valued the defence tech at a reported €4.95bn.
It’s received backing from investors including solo VC Elad Gil, Accel, Saab, Lightspeed, Plural, Greenoaks and Spotify cofounder Daniel Ek as well as Shakil Khan’s investment firm Prima Materia. Helsing employs about 350 people across its main offices in Germany, France and the UK, the company tells Sifted. Helsing is also on a hiring kick, with nearly 40 open roles advertised on its site.
What the startup does is somewhat more complicated. Helsing has kept rather quiet about the specifics of its products and services, but broadly it develops AI software for use on the battlefield, using data from inputs like sensors and cameras in the field. Helsing says it’s been active in Ukraine since 2022, and the startup secured a spot on a programme of record contract — a pre-approved and budgeted bucket of money for a certain defence capability. Helsing also recently announced that it will be incorporating its AI tech into fighter jets in collaboration with defence and aerospace manufacturer Saab. The German government also recently commissioned Helsing to equip attack drones with AI to send to Ukraine.
The company’s cofounder and co-CEO Torsten Reil is perhaps the most recognisable front of Helsing, but he’s surrounded by a leadership team that includes alumni of US software firm Palantir and French defence prime Airbus. Below are the top power players at the German defence company, as of today, according to Helsing’s website.
The Helsing founding team
Cofounder Reil’s roots are far from defence tech — he studied as a biologist and previously founded a gaming company called NaturalMotion, which was spun out from Oxford University and later acquired by American videogame developer Zynga in 2014.
His experience in the gaming industry seems to have played a part in Helsing’s battlefield strategy offerings. Part of the genesis of the idea for Helsing came from years of watching Russia’s increasing aggression in Europe, particularly following its invasion of Crimea in 2014. “I became increasingly concerned that we are falling behind the key technologies in our open societies,” Reil told Wired back in 2023.
Reil cofounded Helsing with the company’s other co-CEO Gundbert Scherf, a former special advisor to the German Federal Ministry of Defence.
According to Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, one of Helsing’s early investors through her firm La Famiglia (now part of General Catalyst), Scherf is the company’s key government liaison. “Selling in Germany […] has the challenge that you first need to get the approval of the military, and once you have the approval of the military, then you have to climb down the ladder, and you have to move up the ladder of parliamentary approval. So that is, just from the procurement process perspective, a really tenacious path, and it requires somebody like Gundbert who really understands the inner workings and inner dynamics to create a meaningful push and pull to land these contracts. You need to be in very close contact with decision makers to understand where the puck is headed, and align from a product perspective,” she told Sifted in a recent podcast interview.
Helsing’s third cofounder, Niklas Köhler, serves as president and chief product officer. Köhler previously founded a deep learning company called Hellsicht in 2017, which has become part of Helsing.
Reil is based in the UK while the other two cofounders are in Germany, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
The C-suite
Reil and Scherf lead the company as co-CEOs and are joined in the C-suite by Robert Fink, the startup’s chief technology officer. Fink worked for more than seven years as a software engineer at US software and data analytics company Palantir, where he developed its SaaS platform Foundry, according to his LinkedIn.
Köhler rounds out the C-suite as chief product officer.
The international team
The startup has operations across Germany, the UK and France. Leading its French branch is Marc Fontaine, a 20+ year veteran of Airbus who joined as CEO of Helsing France in 2022. He held several roles at Airbus, including chief of staff to the CEO and digital transformation officer.
Antoine de Braquilanges is the managing director and deputy CEO of Helsing’s French arm. He previously worked on combat tech at Amazon Web Services (AWS); he was also the France COO and head of business development for commercial at Palantir.
In the UK, where Helsing has its largest foothold by headcount, Amelia Gould leads as managing director, with a focus on the maritime domain. Before joining Helsing in 2022, she spent 11 years in the British Royal Navy as an engineering officer. After that, she joined UK defence prime BAE Systems, where she was the chief of staff to the CEO, also leading the naval combat systems business.
Wolfgang Gammel joined Helsing in 2024 and heads up the company’s German operations as managing director. Like many of the Helsing team, Gammel also comes from Airbus, where he worked as the general sales manager for the company in Germany. He’s focused on Helsing’s programmes with the Eurofighter EK and FCAS (Future Combat Air System), as well as developing the startup’s land and maritime offerings.
Key roles
Antoine Bordes has been Helsing’s vice president of artificial intelligence since 2023, having spent nine years working on AI research at Meta’s AI lab, where he was also co-managing director during his last several years there. At Helsing he leads the startup’s team of AI researchers and deeptech engineers.
Also on that team is a former AWS applied scientist and member of the statistics department at the University of Oxford Cédric Archambeau. He’s Helsing’s director of AI and is focused on the land domain.
Marcel Gordon is the vice president of product at Helsing, having helped build products throughout Europe for Google for 10 years, where he also worked on products for YouTube, per his LinkedIn. His most recent role before joining Helsing was VP of product for French AI insurance company Shift Technology.
Heading up Helsing’s engineering team as vice president is Sam Rogerson, who was previously the head of engineering at Palantir, where he spent nearly eight years.
Stephanie Lingemann is in charge of programmes and partnerships at Helsing, also leading the company’s air domain. She comes from consulting firm McKinsey, and also had a stint as a consultant at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office.
Kirsty Gray joined in 2021 and is Helsing’s director of strategy and operations as well as former chief of staff. She’s based in the UK, according to her LinkedIn. She previously worked at McKinsey and was an entrepreneur in residence at venture incubator Can Do!.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/helsing-leadership-team-org-chart/
