Helsing Raises $223M for AI Defense Tech Advancements

Helsing, a European artificial intelligence (AI) defense company, announced on Thursday, September 14, that it secured $223 million (approximately 209 million euros) in Series B funding, with venture capital firm General Catalyst assuming the lead.

Saab, a Swedish manufacturer of aerospace and automobiles, also participated as an investor. The organization emphasized its dedication to advancing AI technology for the protection of democratic nations.

“We founded Helsing because we believe that AI will be essential so that democracies can continue to defend their values, Our recent traction shows that this belief is shared by governments and industry.”

Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing, said in a statement that the company was founded in 2021 and specializes in the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered military solutions and components for projects such as the forthcoming NATO Eurofighter aircraft upgrade and the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) initiative.

Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence has been compared to a race. A growing number of firms seek to offer governments and armed forces more efficient and cost-effective AI-driven military technologies.

Kratos Defense and Shield AI, both based in San Diego, are two of these corporations exploring the role of AI in warfare. In recent years, artificial intelligence has expanded at an unprecedented rate and is being implemented across a variety of industries.

The capabilities of natural language processing (NLP) systems have been significantly enhanced by the advent of generative AI. These models can generate text that resembles human language, translate between languages, answer queries, and even compose original content.

On July 13, during a press conference, Hollywood actors affirmed they would go on strike due to the use of artificial intelligence to represent background actors.

Generative AI is a variety of artificial intelligence that can generate new content, such as text, images, and music, based on given instructions. Such outputs are generated by tools that are trained on vast quantities of existing data.