Summary

Reil’s headline call: the era of tanks and artillery is over, and 100,000 GPS-free, target-finding strike drones at a border would deter a land war in Europe. A Russian soldier’s survival at the front is apparently “about 20 to 30 minutes,” though Reil calls that a ballpark; 3,000 invading tanks facing 100,000 drones “will destroy those tanks, I think, in a matter of hours.” He caught flak for the claim a year ago — “I still think that’s the case.”
Jamming, the standard objection to drone dominance, is increasingly circumvented. FPVs can use fiber-optic cables while larger drones navigate GPS-free with AI that works “in daylight, at night, in the snow,” even over shell-deformed terrain — so warfare becomes “machines versus machines,” a battle of materiel where sending humans is both suicidal and, in Reil’s word, “unethical.”
Helsing’s AI pilot beat pilots in simulation and then took full control in a real fighter-jet test, weakening the case for crewed jets. Trained with AlphaGo-style reinforcement learning in a simulator running 20–25,000x realtime, it took full control of a Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea last year and flew three air-combat scenarios against a human-controlled Gripen — the “last bastion” of human intuition “turns out to be [bull].” Helsing then bought an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich; the CA-1 Europa flies next year and is designed to launch from motorways because airbases will be attack targets.
The manufacturing thesis: hardware “good enough,” complexity absorbed into software, then pure mass. HX-2 strike-drone output went from dozens a month to a 1,000 baseline and can now scale to 3,000; the bottleneck is contracts, not factories — a €1B German framework just closed. Reil said Germany’s defense budget was €52B last year, originally projected at €153B in 2029 and perhaps now above €180B; with no more soldiers most likely, most of the money would go to equipment.
Helsing was founded in March 2021 when banks bucketed defense with “pornography and gambling and smoking” — some people close to the company had been debanked and no VC would engage, so the €8M seed came from individuals and family offices, then Daniel Ek put in €100M of his own money (“ideally 100 million euros,” a number Reil eyeballed). That war chest funded the program-of-record strategy: Helsing won the Eurofighter electronic-warfare upgrade with Saab as the dark horse 2 years 4 months after founding, which Reil thinks made it the fastest company to reach a program of record.
The exit stance is categorical: “we will never sell the company.” A few months in, the founders chose to “go full throttle and we either completely crash the thing or be super successful” — and Reil argues Europe’s real deficit is not regulation or tax but founder aggression: it’s “95% of a company’s success… everything else is excuses.”
Operationally: talent density above everything — Helsing’s first contract, signed before incorporation, was with a recruitment agency. Constant pipeline pressure makes firing a “low opportunity cost thing,” quarterly calibration reviews hold managers accountable for their ratings, and Reil hires senior people on 10-minute reads for “effortlessness” — deep knowledge plus curiosity plus high agency. He recalls no such miss at Helsing, but three at NaturalMotion.
The best outcome for Helsing is that nothing happens: deterrence via “the cost calculus on the other side.” Reil’s unease is that journalists grilled him on killer robots and red lines before the Ukraine war and “no one asks these questions anymore,” leaving machine life-and-death ethics to the company’s own “inner discipline.”

Deep dive

1. The era of tanks is over — front-line survival is measured in minutes

Reil’s opener: in Ukraine “tanks are barely being used anymore,” and the same holds for artillery. A Russian soldier’s survival time at the front is apparently “about 20 to 30 minutes” — a ballpark, he concedes — and worse in a tank, a top-priority target that ISR drones find easily and small or larger strike drones destroy fast. “I think the era of tanks is probably over.”
Even artillery hiding 40–50 km behind the front gets found and struck by drones. The taxonomy, prompted by Senra: FPVs are small, mostly manually flown quadcopters; strike drones like Helsing’s HX-2 travel long distances and are “quite often AI controlled.”

2. 100,000 strike drones would deter a land war in Europe

The tweet that “got me into a bit of trouble” — Reil stands by it: 3,000 tanks arriving against 100,000 strike drones that navigate without GPS and hunt tanks specifically get destroyed “in a matter of hours.” Senra flips it — how would you invade such a country? “Very difficult”: you’d probably avoid those kinds of crewed vehicles and use smaller autonomous systems instead — “this is basically where everything is going” — drones, autonomous fighter jets, land robots.
Why autonomy is non-negotiable: Ukraine’s thousands of skilled operators “won’t scale to the West and won’t scale to NATO.” Humans stay on or in the loop; AI flies. Status: “reasonably solved” — terminal guidance, the last roughly 2 km, and coordination software are the immediate capabilities being established, with the field now moving toward almost full autonomy.

3. Jamming is increasingly circumvented, so the battlefield becomes machines versus machines

Two jamming problems: video links back to operators are jammed, so a drone must fly autonomously or use a cable — the latter is what is happening with some FPVs — while larger drones can fly themselves; GPS is jammed along “pretty much the whole front line,” so AI can navigate by recognizing its surroundings, like a pilot. The algorithms are now “very robust… in daylight, at night, in the snow,” even with terrain deformed by shell impacts.
This resolves the dinner argument with Senra from years ago (the Freedom’s Forge thesis of out-producing the enemy): “It’s going to be a battle of material. It’s machines versus machines.” The extrapolation: “it’s going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where you know they’re not going to survive” — yet territory still must be retaken and defended, “so you need robots on the ground.”

4. Founding Helsing in 2021, when defense was bucketed with pornography

Reil wasn’t planning a second company post-Natural Motion — he was “pretty low on fuel” — and wouldn’t have done it solo: defense founders juggle technology, politics, export law, classified information, and other complexities at once. He met Gundbert, then responsible for aerospace and defense at McKinsey, in a Berlin café, decided within 30 minutes, looped in Niklas, whose startup solved AI problems for legacy primes, and the three decided within days to start Helsing. It was founded in March 2021.
The climate: “it was very unpopular.” Some people close to the company had been debanked around then; Reil himself was not, while another person close to the company had difficulty getting credit because of its defense involvement. Banks grouped the defense of a country or democratic society “in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.” No VC would talk — “we didn’t even try in the end” — so the €8M seed came from individuals and family offices.
The trigger was Crimea in 2014 — “we all didn’t want it to be true” — plus the asymmetry that the US had Anduril and Palantir while “Europe had nothing.” “It felt like if we don’t start the company then no one else will.”

5. Daniel Ek’s €100M and the decision never to sell

Three months after seed, Ek asked how much they needed. “Ideally 100 million euros” — no budget behind it, “it felt about right… that’s true for almost all funding rounds.” Ek put in his own money via Prima Materia, before the invasion; Reil calls him “closer to a co-founder than an investor.”
On exits, categorical: “we will never sell the company.” The decision came months in: “go full throttle and we either completely crash the thing or be super successful” — nothing in between. Senra’s supporting anecdote from AppLovin’s Adam: stock down from roughly $28B to roughly $3B, borrowed roughly $6B for buybacks, made roughly $60B — “I’m not running a $3 billion company.” Reil: “I think that’s the only way to do it.”
Senra’s crusade against selling (“Got acquired. Sorry to hear that.”) meets Reil’s Tuscany theory: Europe is too pleasant to retire in, and once a few friends do it, it becomes socially accepted — “it shouldn’t be socially acceptable.”

6. Europe’s missing ingredient is aggression — everything else is excuses

Mission before conviction: “protect our democracies” needs no offsite retreat to draft, and Spotify was the beacon showing that a globally consequential European company is possible. To regulation-blamers: yes, a German GmbH needs a notary — “who cares?” Defense compliance is “like 100 times more than what a startup has to deal with… It still doesn’t slow us down. You just have to set the company up properly.”
The claim Senra flags as peak disagreeableness: ambition and aggression are “95% of a company’s success.” The fix is role models: “you just have to have a few very aggressive companies that point out that everyone else is basically mailing it in. And I think a lot of people are.”

7. The program-of-record blueprint: dark horse to prime in 28 months

An insight Reil thinks came from Gundbert, unlocked by the €100M: go straight for programs of record — large, budgeted government programs where one ideally has a direct prime relationship — which startups avoid because qualifying takes far too long for their proof-point cadence. With €100M, “if the first two or three don’t work… we still have enough money left.”
The win: Germany’s Eurofighter electronic-warfare upgrade. Many anti-aircraft radars had become software-defined — “basically shapeshifting” — so old detection approaches no longer worked; Helsing’s deep-learning approach recovered the ability to interpret them, and with partner Saab it beat larger consortia as “the dark horse,” 2 years 4 months after founding. Reil thinks Helsing became the fastest company to go from founding to a program of record.
It became the template for everything since: “we try to find programs of record that are large where we have a feeling that we can contribute something to it that’s differentiated. That’s basically our lens.”

8. A superhuman fighter pilot the pilots said couldn’t exist

Two years ago Helsing set itself the task of creating a superhuman AI pilot for beyond-visual-range combat. Chief scientist Antoine Bordes joined from Meta, where he ran or co-headed Facebook AI Research. The combat is “essentially chess in the sky,” usually two-versus-two, involving radar, missiles, energy management, and re-engagement; it “almost looks like ballet.” Active pilots told Helsing this was the last bastion of air combat and that human intuition could never be replaced. “That turns out to be [bull]… the AI is much, much better.”
Why: reinforcement learning in the AlphaGo/AlphaStar mold, run in a simulator at 20–25,000x realtime, explores the search space in ways a flight-school-trained human cannot. Helsing regularly flies it against active Eurofighter, Rafale, and Gripen pilots.
The proof point: after winning in its own simulation and then being tested in an official simulator from a large prime, last year the AI “took full control” of a Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea in three air-combat scenarios against a human-controlled Gripen. That was when Helsing realized “there’s something bigger happening.” The system, called Centaur, now also works in swarms of fighter jets and drones, and “it scales really well.”
The meta-lesson on timelines: ten years ago everything was “five years away” and took 7–10; now “when you think something is 5 years away, it’s actually usually 2 years away.”

9. CA-1 Europa: buy the aircraft factory, take off from the autobahn

Partnering with a prime on an autonomous jet “would have taken too long,” so Helsing acquired an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich — runway, hangars, full manufacturing — to build the CA-1 Europa around Centaur. First flight next year, ambition “many hundreds” of jets, intent to “leapfrog everyone in this category.”
On the regulation Senra ribbed him about at Michael Dell’s house: prototypes carry a safety pilot in the front because a crash lands on “built-up Bavaria,” not Mojave sand — accommodated without changing the design, like Waymo’s early safety drivers.
The underrated vulnerability: exquisite jets like the Eurofighter and Rafale need airbases (the Gripen excepted) — obvious attack targets — while the CA-1 launches from any makeshift strip, motorway or highway: “you can’t bomb all of it.” Senra offers the WWII Krupp parallel of centralized factories being found and bombed; Reil’s verdict: “certain governments and militaries are still in denial” — though once demonstrations show the capabilities, procurement can move “in record time.”

10. Good-enough hardware, smart software, factories designed not to be bombed

The unified-system thesis: design hardware to mass-produce and push complexity into software — simpler sensors whose accuracy AI recovers, looser manufacturing tolerances recalibrated in software — then win through “pure mass” and saturation attacks.
HX-2 numbers: last July–August production went from dozens per month to a 1,000 baseline and can now scale to 3,000, in one small factory — “a completely different kettle of fish.” Senra asks whether China is building roughly 100 million drones a year; Reil says “not really” and instead cites Ukraine building “2 million or so” of a different type: shorter-range FPVs. A strike drone’s payload is 2–4 kg of explosive, or larger, with a range around 100 km.
The bottleneck isn’t manufacturing speed but programs: a €1 billion German framework contract just closed, and “they now need to come everywhere” — Western countries plus some Asia. Reil said Germany’s defense budget was €52B last year, originally projected, he thought, at €153B in 2029 and perhaps now above €180B. Since there will most likely not be more soldiers, he expected most of the money to go to equipment.
Sovereignty via “resilience factories”: Helsing hardware built on the customer’s soil, supply chains localized to each country’s sensitivity (China excluded, allies welcomed), plants distributed across a continent or underground “so that they are harder to hit.”

11. Deterrence ethics — and the killer-robot questions nobody asks anymore

The moral architecture: minimize lives lost, ideally to zero, which means no conflict at all — hence deterrence, “a credible posture that makes the cost calculus on the other side such that they don’t want to attack because it’ll be too devastating for them.” The best outcome for Helsing is literally that nothing happens.
Whether a machine should decide over life and death “if it is more accurate than a human” is, per Reil, a legitimate question with “no easy answer.” His worry is who stopped asking: before the Ukrainian war, journalists constantly probed killer robots, red lines, and humans in the loop — “these weren’t annoying questions” — and now “no journalist ever asks those questions.” Helsing runs ethics workshops and deployment guides “out of an inner discipline.”
On pacifist pushback — including in Germany, whose “entire postwar identity was never again” (Senra channeling Ek): “we want to have peace too. We just think you have to achieve it by not letting a war happen.” On human nature: the appetite for conflict is partly cultural, partly “hardwired,” probably genetic in part of the population — you likely can’t eliminate the outliers, so contain them and “look very prickly.”
Learning Helsing drones were deployed in Ukraine: “I personally found it very difficult… it became a more serious company,” the light-heartedness of games and SaaS gone. “We don’t take it lightly.”

12. Talent density above everything: the hiring machine and the firing math

Reil’s confessed NaturalMotion mistake — not taking hiring and performance management seriously enough — became Helsing’s founding design: the first contract, signed even before incorporation, was with a recruitment agency, and the three founders reviewed recruiting KPIs weekly for the first year.
The load-bearing insight: hiring and firing are linked. Managers keep bad fits because refilling takes nine months — “at least eventually they’ll get the job done… and that’s not good enough.” Pipeline pressure makes moving people out “a low opportunity cost thing,” and quarterly calibration reviews hold managers accountable for their ratings — “that doesn’t sound like a three, that sounds like a two” — exposing who protects underperforming teams.
His interview method: no standard questions, roughly 10 minutes reading for “effortlessness” — not trying to impress, deep knowledge, “still curious and have high agency.” He recalls no such miss at Helsing, but three at NaturalMotion (“I still know the names”) by people faking it with fake facts. Senra’s counterpunch on delegation — Elon personally approved SpaceX’s first 3,000 hires; Bending Spoons runs 50 HR engineers correlating CV signals with multi-year performance — draws agreement on the principle: “it compounds over time.”
Culture is downstream of density: at a company get-together, the team spontaneously rewrote Helsing’s values — “whatever it takes” (people back from the Ukrainian front line, 48 hours without sleep) and “the truth is in the field,” because systems must work in combat, not government tests. And “the power law in talent is extreme”: Helsing makes exceptions for its 10-out-of-10s, owed “gratefulness” for turning projects “from red to green.”

13. From walking neural nets in 1999 to CSR Racing — the outsider’s throughline

The origin Eureka: a 1999 complex-systems PhD working with fully recurrent neural networks and genetic algorithms modeled on biological central pattern generators, hooked to early physics engines such as MathEngine and Havok — overnight, “I literally had this two-legged creature walking over the screen, fully physically simulated.” That became NaturalMotion: Endorphin at $50k a license in Lord of the Rings, Troy, Spider-Man, and Harry Potter; real-time technology in Rockstar’s GTA IV, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption, and others; then making games itself — CSR Racing, “the biggest game of all time on the iPhone at the time,” delivered the hockey stick.
Senra fishes for the connective theme between his two companies; Reil’s answer is outsiderness: never feeling part of the biology or gaming peer group made contrarianism easier — pricing games at 99 cents to maximize revenue when the industry insisted on $5, going first-big in free-to-play 3D. “It would be much harder for us to build Helsing if the backgrounds had already been in defense companies. It’s easier to be an outsider.”
The closing salvo on LinkedIn/X culture: “commentary is entirely worthless… it has a net negative benefit,” since platforms reward negative commentators over creators. Prescription: “You either do something about it or you don’t talk about it” — and founders “have the biggest lever” to change society, which is why so few of them are posting.

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