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Company says it can produce tens of thousands of weapons a year at lower cost than current autonomous systems

European defence technology start-up Helsing has unveiled its first attack drone as the AI specialist seeks to capitalise on rising demand for autonomous weapons driven by the war in Ukraine.  

The company is pitching its new drone, which is already being used in Ukraine, to the UK and other Nato allies. Helsing says it can produce tens of thousands of the AI-enabled drones a year at a lower cost than existing systems, using advanced manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. 

Nato “urgently requires technology to protect the integrity of the eastern flank”, said Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing, in reference to the military alliance’s members in eastern and central Europe. 

The company believes that if deployed at scale along borders then the new drones, dubbed HX-2, will be able to act as a “counter-invasion shield” against enemy forces on the ground. 

Ukraine has underlined the shift in modern warfare from the use of traditional hardware such as tanks, guns and munitions to more software-defined technologies, in particular autonomous systems, to enable troops to outsmart the enemy.

One of the challenges Ukraine’s armed forces have encountered is Russian electromagnetic jamming, which disrupts GPS and communications between drones and their operators.

Helsing said its HX-2 drones, which are able to fly up to 100km, will be equipped with software that will enable them to search for, re-identify and engage targets even without a signal or a continuous data connection. A human operator will retain control at all times.

Helsing, founded in 2021, was valued at €4.95bn during its latest funding round in the summer, which was led by General Catalyst and included Accel and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The company has pledged to set up a manufacturing facility in the UK as part of a £350mn investment in the country over the next five years

Helsing hopes to emerge as one of the winners from the British government’s strategic defence review and plans for a new defence industrial strategy, which aims to include input from technology companies as well as the industry’s traditional giants. 

Defence secretary John Healey, unveiling the plans for the new strategy on Monday, said the government needed to learn the lessons from Ukraine where the “pace of innovation is measured in weeks, not months”. 

Helsing has already signed partnership deals with some of Europe’s established defence contractors, including Germany’s Rheinmetall and Sweden’s Saab, to integrate AI into existing platforms such as fighter jets. The start-up is also working with Airbus on AI technologies that will be used in manned and unmanned systems.

Nebius, led by Russian-Israeli billionaire Arkady Volozh, believes deal will help ‘neocloud’ group return from ‘the ashes’

Nebius, the artificial intelligence infrastructure group that was formed from Yandex’s operations outside Russia earlier this year, has raised $700mn from investors including chipmaker Nvidia to capitalise on exploding demand for AI data centres.

The new equity financing, via a private placement, comes six weeks after trading in Nebius’ stock resumed on Nasdaq, following its split in July from Yandex, Russia’s biggest internet group. Other investors involved in the deal announced on Monday include Silicon Valley venture firm Accel.

Nebius, led by chief Arkady Volozh, a rare Russian businessman to publicly condemn Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and who has become an Israeli citizen, said: “Now we are finalising our journey from the ashes back in July to being a real company with real capital.”

Nvidia’s move to take a stake displayed the “very good and deep relationship” between Nebius and the dominant supplier of AI chips, Volozh said. The company plans to bring Nvidia’s new Blackwell series of graphics processing units online in its cloud service next year.

“Of course we hope that such a close relationship will help us to get more quotas [of Nvidia chips] and sooner,” Volozh added. “It [Nvidia’s equity investment] doesn’t have a direct relationship to getting the GPUs, the deal is not about the GPUs. But of course it shows our close relationship which we hope will influence our pipelines.”

Two years after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT kick-started a wave of investment in AI infrastructure, demand for computing capacity to train ever-larger models shows few signs of slowing. Nvidia has said it expects demand to exceed supply of Blackwell for most of next year.

Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius is racing to build out new data centres packed with Nvidia’s chips to train and run AI systems for clients including French AI group Mistral. It is competing with other so-called AI “neocloud” services such as Nvidia-backed CoreWeave, which has raised more than $9bn in equity and debt to date according to PitchBook, as well as its US rivals Lambda Labs and Crusoe.

By focusing on new ways of building data centres that they say are better suited to the requirements of AI, neocloud companies are trying to challenge the dominance of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud in the cloud computing market.

Nebius’ biggest data centre is in Mäntsälä, Finland but Volozh told reporters on Monday that the new capital would finance its plans to expand in the US next year, where demand from customers is stronger than in Europe.

“This is not the last capital we will be raising,” Volozh said, suggesting it could return to the market later next year. “But we are one of only a few public companies [among AI neoclouds] which provides us cheaper access to capital . . . I think we are one of the few or the only one in this new cloud push who has no debt.”

Shares in US-listed Yandex were suspended in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After a protracted negotiation with the Kremlin, Yandex struck a $5.4bn deal in February to sell its core Russian business to a consortium of investors.

Nebius is formed from the remainder of Yandex’s former international operations. As well as its main focus on AI cloud computing, the group also includes a self-driving car venture, Avride, and an edtech service.

At the same time as announcing the new funds, Nebius said it would cancel a planned share buyback, pointing to high volumes since trading resumed on Nasdaq that would have allowed any investors from the Yandex era to exit the stock if they wished to.

Following the equity financing Nebius will have more than $3bn in cash. The company said it expects its annual revenue run rate to grow to $750mn-$1bn by the end of next year, up from previous guidance of $500mn-$1bn.

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