AI defence tech Helsing unveiled its first factory in southern Germany to build 6,000 new autonomous strike drones to deliver to Ukraine, cementing the startup’s recent push into military hardware.
Announcing the factory’s completion on the eve of the annual Munich Security Conference, Helsing said it would build an additional 6,000 of its new HX-2 drones to send to Ukraine as war with Russia rages on, an increase on the roughly 4,000 drones of a different model the country previously ordered.
Helsing’s new drones have “advanced on-board AI” which “enables full resistance to electronic warfare,” according to a press release the company shared on Thursday.
“It is clear that NATO has important lessons to learn, and fast,” Helsing cofounder Gundbert Scherf said in a statement. Its new factory strategy is “taking a distributed approach towards mass manufacturing these systems across Europe, allowing individual nation states to produce locally and ensure sovereignty of production and supply chain.”
Helsing’s new factory is a further step in its strategy, and comes at a time when Europe is scrambling to bolster its defence capabilities as the US signals a far more protectionist stance. The company will “provide nation states with local and sovereign manufacturing capacities,” it says; Helsing will build these factories across Europe, the company says, with “the ability to scale manufacturing rates to tens of thousands of units in case of a conflict.”
The new factory is already operational and has an initial monthly production capacity of over 1,000 drones, it says.
Helsing’s move into hardware late last year didn’t surprise industry insiders, but they believe it could provide a means for other startups to potentially partner with Helsing in the future — or to consolidate. Early Helsing investor Jeannette Zu Fürstenberg of General Catalyst recently told Sifted that she believes “the players will have to consolidate”; long-term, startups will either have to have a highly differentiated capability or a cheaper price point, and that technology and mass manufacturing capabilities — for example, being able to churn out tens of thousands of drones a year — will differentiate drones companies, she said.
Helsing has been buddying up with other European upstarts recently.: Earlier this week the company struck a partnership with French OpenAI challenger Mistralp to develop large language models (LLMs) for defence.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/helsing-ai-attack-drones-factory-germany/
