German defence start-up Helsing raises 600 million euros in latest investment round
BERLIN :German defence start-up Helsing has raised 600 million euros ($693.30 million) in its latest investment round, lead by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, the firm said on Tuesday.
The latest investment round has raised Helsing's value to $12 billion, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
This positions the start-up among the top five private tech companies in Europe, the FT added.
The investment round was lead by Prima Materia, an investment company founded by Ek and Spotify investor Shakil Khan, which doubled its investment in the firm.
Other investors included Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst and SAAB, Helsing said in a statement.
The Munich-based defence start-up, which specializes in AI software and is moving to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines, hopes to benefit from governments ramping up defence spending amid rising geopolitical tensions.
($1 = 0.8654 euros)
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNA
an hour ago
- CNA
Musk's xAI in talks for $4.3 billion equity funding, Bloomberg News reports
Elon Musk's AI startup xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion through an equity investment on top of its $5 billion debt funding plans, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing information shared with investors. Between its founding in 2023 and when the debt sale was launched this year, xAI raised $14 billion through equity fundraising, the report said. The Grok chatbot maker needs new funding, partly because it has already spent most of what it previously raised, according to the report.
CNA
2 hours ago
- CNA
Applied Intuition valued at $15 billion in latest fund raise
Applied Intuition secured a $15 billion valuation in a funding round where it raised $600 million, the automotive software supplier said on Tuesday, signaling a strong investment appetite for commercialized autonomous vehicle technology. The funding was co-led by BlackRock-managed funds and accounts alongside venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. New investors included Franklin Templeton and Qatar Investment Authority, the company said. The funds will help Applied Intuition double down on investments in autonomous technology at a time when companies across the auto sector attempt to ramp up their push for self-driving cars. "We're scaling up our investments in bringing intelligence into every moving machine," said Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. The Mountain View, California-based company, whose customers include Toyota and Volkswagen, also partnered with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last week, aiming to leverage AI to personalize driving experience.
CNA
2 hours ago
- CNA
Adobe brings AI-image generation app to phones, adds partners
SAN FRANCISCO :Adobe Inc. released its first dedicated artificial intelligence smartphone app on Tuesday that includes AI models from the company and partner firms, in a bid to tap into a growing trend of sharing AI images and videos over social media. The new app, called Firefly, packages Adobe's own AI model together with models from new partner firms Ideogram, Luma AI, Pika and Runway, and is available on iOS and Android phones. Previously, the service was available only as a web version, that used models from Alphabet's GOOGL.O> Google and OpenAI in addition to Adobe's model. Those models will also be available in the app, Adobe said. Generating images that can easily be shared on social media has become a key driver of AI interest, with OpenAI's Ghibli-style AI images driving record traffic to the ChatGPT creator. Adobe's mobile service will offer subscribers unlimited basic image generation from Adobe models, while it will charge extra for access to the company's premium models and those from its partners. The subscription cost will be the same as for the web versions of Firefly, which start at $10 per month. The San Jose, California-based company had earlier released AI tools along with the mobile app version of its popular image-editing program Photoshop. Adobe has not disclosed how much it pays the partner models on the Firefly app. The company had promised users that its AI model is trained only on material that it has a legal right to use, with Adobe offering protection against copyright claims. Ely Greenfield, Adobe's chief technology officer for digital media, said Adobe's approach has also gained some resonance among consumers. "Even for many of our individual customers, that promise of the commercial safety and the story about how Firefly is trained continues to be a really important differentiator," Greenfield said.
