The Helsing Playbook

COMMANDER · ISSUE 02 · 12 June 2026 · Istanbul

A biologist who once taught video-game characters how to walk now runs Europe's most valuable defense company. Four years ago, Torsten Reil's biggest win was a $527 million exit to a mobile-games studio. By June 2025, the company he co-founded was valued at €12 billion — and reportedly raising again at $18 billion before its fourth birthday. Same founder. Roughly 25x the price tag. No factory, at first. Just code.

The business behind the hardware. Not what they build — how they built it.

Issue 01 took apart Baykar: bootstrapped, family-owned, hardware-first, allergic to outside money. Helsing is the photographic negative. Venture-backed to the eyeballs, software-first, and willing to raise more in a single round than most defense primes earn in profit a year. Two companies, same sector, opposite operating systems. This issue is about the one that wrote code first and welded second — and out-capitalized an entire industry of incumbents who'd been bending metal for fifty years.

Here are the seven moves.

Helsing's founding bet was a sentence, not a prototype: defense is a data-and-software problem wearing a hardware costume. In 2021, three founders with no product and no contracts raised a €100 million Series A — led not by a defense fund but by Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, through his vehicle Prima Materia. A music-streaming billionaire wrote the first big check into a defense startup. That is not an accident of networking; it's the result of framing the company as a software platform that happened to point at defense, rather than a defense contractor that happened to write software.

The lesson isn't "raise a giant seed." It's that a clean, contrarian thesis — stated as a category, not a product — is what lets you raise against a vision before the revenue exists. Baykar earned permission with flying metal. Helsing earned it with a worldview.

Takeaway: Investors fund the thesis before the product, but only if the thesis names a new category. Sell the worldview, not the widget.

Look at the cap-table-of-talent. Reil is a biology dropout turned games entrepreneur. Gundbert Scherf is an ex-McKinsey partner who served as a special advisor inside Germany's defense ministry. Niklas Köhler came from healthcare AI, where he'd worked on spotting cancer in medical scans — and noticed the math for finding a tumor in a CT image is uncomfortably close to the math for finding an object in a sensor feed.

That's three non-overlapping circles: commercial product instincts, institutional and procurement access, and hard technical credibility. No two of them could have raised that Series A alone. Together they covered every objection an investor or a ministry could raise.

Takeaway: A founding team should be a Venn diagram with almost no overlap. If your co-founders could swap jobs, you're missing a circle.

Most startups treat shared command as a failure waiting to happen. Helsing institutionalized it: Scherf and Reil run as co-CEOs, with Köhler as president. The split maps cleanly to the two halves of a defense business that pull in opposite directions — the outward-facing world of governments, capital, and trust, and the inward-facing world of product, engineering, and recruiting. One CEO can credibly live in a ministry waiting room; the other can credibly live in a code review. Asking one person to do both is how defense startups stall.

The structure only works because the founders are mismatched (see Move 2). Identical co-CEOs fight over the same turf. Complementary ones partition it.

Takeaway: Co-CEO works when the seam between the two jobs is real and visible. Split by domain, not by ego.

The funding ladder is the headline, and the cadence is the lesson:

That's not just a lot of money; it's velocity. Each round roughly doubled or more on the last, on a roughly annual clock. A fifty-year-old prime moves at the speed of a defense budget cycle. Helsing moved at the speed of a venture term sheet — and used the capital to buy years of R&D and manufacturing the incumbents expected to keep as their moat. When a software company can out-raise the metal-benders, the metal stops being a moat.

Takeaway: In a slow-moving sector, fundraising speed is itself a weapon. Capital velocity buys you the years your incumbents assume you don't have.

Here's the plot twist that makes Helsing interesting rather than just well-funded. The company that sold a software-first thesis spent 2024–2025 going vertical — into hardware, airframes, and factories.

It started designing its own aerial systems, then built physical plants to make them. It acquired Grob Aircraft (around 275 staff) to pull airframe manufacturing in-house, and acquired Blue Ocean, an Australian underwater-vehicle developer, to do the same on the maritime side. The pure-software company decided that owning the metal was the point after all.

This isn't a reversal; it's a sequence. Software-first let Helsing raise on multiples and stay capital-light long enough to become the buyer rather than the bought. Then it used the war chest to acquire the hard, slow, unglamorous manufacturing capability — the exact thing Baykar started with. Both companies are converging on the same full-stack outcome. They just entered from opposite doors, and Helsing's door let it spend other people's money on the way in.

Takeaway: Software-first isn't a permanent identity — it's a financing strategy. Stay light long enough to become the acquirer, then buy the moat you couldn't have afforded on day one.

When Helsing built factories, it didn't just build factories — it branded a manufacturing doctrine. It calls them Resilience Factories: facilities explicitly designed not for peacetime efficiency but to keep producing when supply chains break. Distributed sites, standardized processes, local supply chains, deliberately placed inside the countries that buy from it — RF-1 in southern Germany, a second in Plymouth in the UK tied to a roughly £350M commitment.

Read that as a go-to-market move, not an industrial one. By making manufacturing local and sovereign, Helsing turned "where you build it" into part of the sales pitch. A government doesn't just buy a product; it buys domestic jobs, domestic capacity, and a factory it can point to. The factory is the salesperson.

Takeaway: When your buyer is a nation, localize the supply chain on purpose. Sovereignty is a feature you can manufacture — literally.

Helsing didn't try to build every layer of its own AI stack from scratch. It announced an alliance with Mistral, Europe's flagship AI lab, to develop models for its platforms. Pairing the continent's leading defense-AI company with its leading general-AI lab does two things: it buys technical depth Helsing would take years to grow internally, and — louder — it signals "European sovereign stack" to exactly the governments writing the checks. The partnership is half engineering, half positioning, and the positioning half may be worth more.

Takeaway: A peer partnership with a category leader buys credibility faster than headcount can. Pick the partner whose logo answers your customer's biggest unspoken objection.

Issue 03. We've now torn down the two ends of the spectrum: Baykar built the metal and refused the money; Helsing took the money and bought the metal. So what happens when a company refuses to pick a side at all — and insists on owning every layer, funded entirely from its own pocket, on purpose? One of these companies turned "we'll fund our own R&D and answer to no one" into a valuation that makes Helsing's raises look modest. The catch: it never had to ask permission, because it never took the check. Same destination, no investors in the room. We'll name it next issue.

Commander is the business behind the hardware. Not what they build — how they built it.

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COMMANDER · ISSUE 02 · commander.media · Istanbul