German AI defence unicorn Helsing has created an internal incubator to work on secret moonshot projects — including AI agents for the battlefield.
Six months ago, Helsing carved out a separate team — known as Area 9 — for tinkering on new, risky products and capabilities for the company.
The startup, which until recently has been notoriously secretive about what it does, unveiled the incubator at its first-ever media day on Wednesday. It’s a big change in strategy for the four-year-old company, which has been very vague about its products — until this year. Helsing and its cofounder and co-CEO Torsten Reil have been more vocal amid Europe’s broader rush to rearm the continent as US support has grown tenuous.
Currently Helsing has products in the air, land and sea domains — like drones and subsea surveillance systems. Antoine Bordes, Helsing’s chief scientist, said the incubator is part of the startup’s future strategy to stay innovative.
The incubator currently has 30 dedicated employees, and will have over 40 by the end of the year, Bordes said. It also receives dedicated internal investment, although Bordes declined to disclose how much apart from saying it is a “tiny” amount compared to the money going into the company’s other domains.
Reil said the startup’s land domain — which includes its new HX-2 autonomous strike drones — receives the most investment within the company, followed by its air and (newest) sea domain. Helsing now has a lot of money to play with: it recently raised €600m at a whopping €12bn valuation.
Currently the incubator is working on an AI battlefield intelligence agent that can use real-time raw data inputs from things like satellites, synthetic aperture radar and reconnaissance drones to analyse and map out battlefields and answer queries like: “show me all the damaged buildings” or “show me all the tyre tracks” in a given area. (The demonstration of these queries took a while to yield results, but Bordes said they weren’t aiming for speed.)
Bordes says the agents are using new AI techniques developed within the last six months for the project.
Cofounder and co-CEO Gundbert Scherf said the incubator will enable Helsing to keep developing futuristic technology, instead of just scaling its current products. “We made a clear choice — and we institutionalised this with Area 9” — to keep making “very risky” bets, he said.
Area 9 may also strike “more open-ended” partnerships to work on cutting-edge tech, Bordes said. Helsing and OpenAI challenger Mistral struck a secretive deal earlier in 2025 — although the company declined to provide further details on what the partnership is actually building, or any further details about what Area 9 is working on.
As the Helsing team was quick to point out: the AI agent is not a product — yet.
