Europe’s Defence AI Companies: Who Is Building What in 2026

Europe’s defence AI companies form a three-layer market in 2026. Munich’s Helsing, valued at $18 billion after a $1.8 billion round in July 2026, and Quantum Systems, which raised $1.2 billion the same month, lead a scale-up wave fed by a record $8.7 billion of venture money in 2025. Above them, Thales, Hensoldt, Rheinmetall, Leonardo and Saab are folding AI into command, sensor and combat-air products. Around them, Anduril, Palantir and Shield AI are winning British, Dutch and NATO contracts. Public money from the €1 billion European Defence Fund 2026 call, NATO DIANA and national AI agencies decides who scales.

Why Europe is building its own military AI

The short answer is Ukraine, and the slightly longer answer is dependence. Four years of drone and electronic warfare on Europe’s eastern edge have shown that software, not airframes, decides whether a cheap system survives its first week at the front, and that software ages in months. Governments that once bought a platform and a support contract now want a supplier that ships an update every few weeks.

Here the money tells the story. According to the Dealroom and NATO Innovation Fund report published in February 2026, European defence, security and resilience startups raised $8.7 billion in 2025, a 55 per cent rise on 2024 and nearly four times the level of five years earlier. Late-stage rounds tripled to $4.7 billion. AI underpinned 44 per cent of all that funding, the highest share in six years. The UK attracted $2.9 billion and Germany $2.1 billion, with Munich the leading hub.

The second driver is sovereignty, and it is political as much as technical. The Alliance bought Palantir’s Maven Smart System NATO in a sole-source deal completed in about six months, and the UK Ministry of Defence signed a partnership with the same company in September 2025 that could see £1.5 billion invested in Britain. European ministries want those tools, and they also want a domestic alternative they can certify, host on their own classified networks and export without a US licence. That tension runs through every entry in the table below. The broader startup landscape behind it is mapped in European Defence Tech Startups: Who Funds Them and Who Buys.

The primes: turning AI into products

Thales runs the largest corporate AI organisation in European defence. Its cortAIx accelerator, launched in 2024, employs more than 800 AI specialists across five hubs in France, the UK, Canada, Singapore and Germany. In February 2026 Thales brought Naval Group in as a capital investor in cortAIx France, pooling naval engineering from Naval Group’s Ollioules centre with Thales’s AI teams for command-and-control, sonar and electronic-warfare applications.

Hensoldt has chosen a different route: supply the sensors and the data backbone, and let a scale-up write the autonomy. In February 2026 the Taufkirchen sensor house signed a strategic partnership with Helsing under which its radar, optronics, self-protection and electromagnetic-warfare packages, plus its MDOcore multi-domain software, go onto Helsing’s CA-1 Europa autonomous combat aircraft, a design shown full-size at the Grob Aircraft facility in Bavaria and targeted for service around 2029. The electronic-warfare side of this partnership is examined in How AI Is Changing Electronic Warfare in Europe: Cognitive EW.

Rheinmetall’s AI story is about data volume rather than algorithms. In December 2025 the German procurement office BAAINBw awarded the Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions joint venture a contract worth about €1.7 billion gross, running to the end of 2030, for exclusive access to a synthetic aperture radar constellation with operations, ground stations and AI-driven image evaluation included; satellite production starts at Neuss in the third quarter of 2026. In September 2026 Rheinmetall also published the first interface specifications of its Battlesuite platform on GitHub, a bid to become the operating layer other companies’ drones and effectors plug into.

Leonardo unveiled the Michelangelo Dome on 1 December 2025, a multi-domain defence architecture that fuses radar, satellite and infrared feeds at hundreds of terabytes per second and uses AI for predictive threat assessment and effector coordination. A first iteration, called Dead Zone, is due to the Italian Ministry of Defence by the end of 2027, so the label is PROTOTYPE, not operational. Indra, for its part, presented the results of the EDF-funded FaRADAI project in Thessaloniki in August 2026, showing its IndraMind software interpreting ground scenes and re-planning routes for a 38-partner consortium, and it took its Nimbus combat cloud to sea at REPMUS 2026.

Saab did what no other European prime had done: it handed a fighter to an AI agent in flight. Between 28 May and 3 June 2025 a Gripen E flew with Helsing’s Centaur integrated under Saab’s Project Beyond, and on the final sortie Centaur flew beyond-visual-range engagements against a crewed Gripen D, cueing the pilot to fire. In June 2026 Saab followed up with a strategic investment in Paris-based Comand AI, tying its Prevail software to GlobalEye. MBDA has a smaller-scale equivalent in NEODE Systems, the AI subsidiary it created in January 2024, which won its first DGA contract in June 2025 to demonstrate beyond-line-of-sight Akeron MP shots using the Ground Warden decision aid. Airbus Defence and Space’s Wingman concept relies on Helsing for its AI; BAE Systems, Kongsberg and QinetiQ round out the tier, QinetiQ as a member of the UK’s 26-company Asgard framework.

The scale-ups: Helsing, Quantum Systems, Tekever and the interceptor wave

The second layer is where the money and the headlines have gone since 2024. Three companies now carry unicorn valuations on the back of real orders rather than pitch decks, and behind them a cluster of interceptor and drone-software firms has started to win its first framework contracts. What separates them from the primes is cadence: they ship software in weeks and expect to be judged on what works in Ukraine, not on a qualification schedule.

The picture is less tidy than the valuations suggest. Only a handful of these companies have a fielded system in a NATO army, several depend on one anchor customer, and the parliamentary conditions attached to Germany’s 2026 orders show that governments are buying with a hand on the brake.

Helsing

Helsing is the company the rest of the ecosystem is measured against. Founded in Munich in 2021, it closed a $1.8 billion Series E in July 2026 at an $18 billion valuation, a round Defense News reported as led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst, up from a €12 billion valuation in June 2025. Its product range now spans the HX-2 strike drone, the Altra battlefield software, the Centaur air-combat agent and the CA-1 Europa uncrewed fighter concept. A fuller account is in Helsing Explained: Europe’s Defence AI Firm, Drones, Funding.

The contract that matters most is domestic. On 25 February 2026 the Bundestag budget committee approved base orders of €268 million each for Helsing’s HX-2 and Stark’s Virtus loitering munitions, with options that could add roughly €1 billion per supplier subject to technical maturity and further parliamentary votes; the systems are meant to equip Germany’s armoured brigade in Lithuania in 2027. Lawmakers attached oversight and cancellation clauses; this is PROCUREMENT, not yet a fielded capability, and Rheinmetall’s FV-014 is expected to be treated on the same terms.

Quantum Systems and Tekever

Quantum Systems, the Gilching maker of the Vector reconnaissance drone, raised $1.2 billion in a Series D announced on 2 July 2026, money earmarked for manufacturing, supply chains and the MOSAIC UXS software layer that is meant to tie its Vector and Reliant aircraft and MANDRILL ground vehicle into one autonomous family. Its disclosed customers include Romania, the US Army and Ukraine. The valuation, reported at about $8 billion, is not confirmed by the company.

Portugal’s Tekever is the quieter unicorn. Its systems have flown more than 10,000 combat hours with Ukrainian and British users, and on 27 July 2026 the UK’s Defence Equipment and Support confirmed a contract worth up to £400 million for up to 24 AR5 aircraft by 2029, built in Swindon, to replace Watchkeeper. On 23 September 2026 the company announced a $580 million first close of its Series D at a $6.4 billion valuation, led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford.

The next wave

Below the unicorns sits a layer of specialists that are already selling. Auterion and Ukraine’s SkyFall began delivering 50,000 Shrike strike drones fitted with Auterion’s Skynode S terminal-guidance kit in July 2026, funded by an unnamed European NATO government, with swarming promised as a later software update. Comand AI raised €32 million in June 2026 for Prevail, a command workspace built from specialised AI agents already used by units in France, Germany and Ukraine; the agentic side of that approach is covered in Agentic AI in Defence: What European Militaries Are Testing.

The counter-drone segment is where the money moved fastest in 2026. Cambridge Aerospace, a London company barely two years old, closed a $300 million Series C led by DFJ Growth on 10 August 2026, bringing its total to $500 million, on the back of UK MOD contracts for its Skyhammer interceptor. Latvia’s Origin Robotics signed a multi-year framework for its Blaze interceptor in December 2025, with a first SAFE-financed order in April 2026. Munich’s Alpine Eagle, whose Sentinel airborne counter-drone system went to the Bundeswehr in 2024, said in March 2026 it had three more European customers. The segment is analysed in Counter-Drone Lasers in Europe: Operational or Prototype?.

On the ground, ARX Robotics raised €31 million in April 2025 with the NATO Innovation Fund among its backers and says six European armed forces use its Gereon vehicles running the Mithra operating system. Estonia’s Milrem Robotics remains the reference supplier for tracked UGVs and spent 2026 widening its partner base with Hanwha Systems at Eurosatory and Poland’s PGZ at MSPO; both firms are covered in Europe’s Military UGV Programmes: Which Armies Are Buying. ICEYE has become the space-ISR node of the ecosystem, with sovereign SAR contracts in Poland (about €200 million for three satellites plus three options), the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland, and AI analytics partners SATIM and Safran.AI, the former Preligens.

US entrants and the Europe-versus-US gap

The Americans are not waiting for Europe to sort itself out. Anduril raised $5 billion at a $61 billion valuation in May 2026, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, on 2025 revenue of $2.2 billion, and in the same month announced a counter-drone contract from the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Anduril UK sits inside the British Army’s Asgard framework. Its June 2025 partnership with Rheinmetall to build European variants of Fury and Barracuda was a headline of the year.

Palantir is the incumbent in the software layer. NATO’s sole-source purchase of Maven Smart System NATO was finalised in spring 2025 after a six-month procurement, one of the fastest in the Alliance’s history, with a deeper role planned for the 2026 exercise cycle. The UK partnership signed in September 2025 makes London Palantir’s European defence headquarters, creates up to 350 jobs and could produce up to £750 million of contracts over five years in decision support, planning and targeting. Shield AI is following the airframe route instead, flying its Hivemind autonomy on Destinus’s Hornet in Spain in March 2026 and partnering with UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía to put it on Spanish-built platforms.

Put the numbers side by side and the gap is plain. Anduril’s single May 2026 round was worth more than half of everything European defence, security and resilience startups raised in all of 2025, and Helsing’s $18 billion is less than a third of Anduril’s valuation. Europe’s answer is not one champion but many: three unicorns, a dozen funded specialists and primes that increasingly buy from them, held together by the public money described below. Whether that is enough depends on whether the Bundeswehr and the UK MOD convert 2026 framework contracts into serial orders in 2027.

Where Türkiye fits

Türkiye enters this map as a supplier, not a bystander. In January 2026 STM confirmed the first export of its KARGU rotary-wing and ALPAGU fixed-wing loitering munitions to an armed force that is both an EU and NATO member, unnamed by the company; the systems use AI-supported image processing and will be integrated onto armoured vehicles, with STM writing the battle-management software.

The bigger structural move is Baykar’s joint venture with Leonardo, LBA Systems. In June 2026 the two companies flew a Leonardo M-346FA whose crew took control of an uncrewed Baykar KIZILELMA out of Çorlu, a crewed-uncrewed teaming demonstration with an Italian prime as partner, discussed further in Europe’s Loyal Wingman Programmes: Who Is Building CCAs. ASELSAN showed its KORKUT 100/25 with what it calls an AI-based fire control core at DSEI in London in September 2025, and HAVELSAN unveiled the BARKAN 3 UGV and its ADVENT-AI decision layer at SAHA Expo in Istanbul in May 2026, with swarm trials of eight units so far and the Turkish Armed Forces as the only confirmed customer. Those last two remain at FIELD TRIAL and DEMONSTRATOR level respectively.

Who pays: the public programmes behind the ecosystem

The European Commission’s European Defence Fund work programme for 2026, approved on 18 December 2025, allocates €1 billion across 31 collaborative topics. Half goes to major capabilities, a quarter to forward-looking technology including a dedicated technological challenge on AI-based tactical situational awareness with small robots and drones, and a quarter to the EU Defence Innovation Scheme, whose EUDIS accelerator runs two cohorts of 20 companies with €120,000 vouchers each. Indra’s FaRADAI shows what an earlier EDF AI call produced. Swarm-specific calls are followed in Drone Swarms in Europe: Countries, Companies and Programmes.

NATO runs two instruments. DIANA, the Alliance’s accelerator, selected 150 companies from 24 nations for its 2026 challenge programme, more than double the 2025 cohort, across ten challenge areas that include autonomy and unmanned systems and data-assisted decision making, with access to 16 accelerator sites and more than 200 test centres. The NATO Innovation Fund, the €1 billion multi-sovereign venture fund backed by 24 allies, invests directly in the layer below the unicorns; ARX Robotics is a portfolio company. The EU’s SAFE loan facility is the newest tool, and Latvia’s Blaze interceptor order is among the first AI-related purchases to draw on it.

National agencies fill in the rest. France created AMIAD, the Agence ministérielle pour l’IA de défense, in 2024 with a research arm at École polytechnique and a production arm at Bruz, on a funding path to €2 billion by 2030, plus a classified AI supercomputer at Suresnes open to French industry. The UK’s Asgard programme, which the MOD says is backed by more than £1 billion, awarded a four-year Digital Decision Accelerators for Defence framework to 26 companies in early 2026, Helsing, Anduril, QinetiQ, Leonardo and Tekever among them, focused on the “decide” step of the targeting cycle. Germany’s Cyberagentur is narrower: its €25 million Robust and Secure Machine Learning programme entered its fourth phase in January 2026, with three consortia working on protecting AI training against manipulation.

The picture is less tidy on the ground. Frameworks are not orders, and every loitering-munition, interceptor and UGV supplier above needs the Bundeswehr, the UK MOD or a Nordic-Baltic buyer to exercise its options in 2027. The naval side, where Kongsberg’s Vanguard concept and the Stark-MBDA uncrewed vessel work sit, is covered in Unmanned Surface Vessels in Europe: Who Builds, What Works. What 2026 does show is that Europe now has a full stack of defence AI suppliers, from sensor to software to effector. The bottleneck has moved from money to certification, production capacity and the willingness of ministries to buy at scale.

Frequently asked questions

Which are the largest defence AI companies in Europe?

By valuation the leaders are Helsing ($18 billion after a $1.8 billion round in July 2026), Quantum Systems ($1.2 billion raised in July 2026, valuation not confirmed) and Tekever ($6.4 billion in September 2026). Among primes, Thales’s cortAIx, with more than 800 AI specialists, is the largest dedicated defence AI organisation, followed by Leonardo, Hensoldt, Rheinmetall and Saab.

Is Helsing the European Anduril?

It is the closest comparison, but the scale differs. Anduril raised $5 billion at $61 billion in May 2026 on $2.2 billion of 2025 revenue; Helsing is valued at $18 billion. Helsing’s confirmed contracts are the Bundeswehr’s €268 million HX-2 base order, deliveries to Ukraine and membership of the UK Asgard framework, while its CA-1 Europa aircraft remains a demonstrator targeting 2029.

Which US companies are winning European defence AI contracts?

Palantir sold Maven Smart System NATO to the Alliance in 2025 and signed a £1.5 billion UK partnership in September 2025. Anduril won a Dutch counter-drone contract in May 2026 and sits inside the UK Asgard framework. Shield AI is integrating Hivemind on European airframes through partnerships with Destinus and UAV Navigation-Grupo Oesía in Spain.

How does the EU fund defence AI?

Mainly through the European Defence Fund, whose 2026 work programme is worth €1 billion across 31 topics and includes an AI-based tactical situational awareness challenge, and through the EU Defence Innovation Scheme accelerator. NATO adds DIANA (150 companies in 2026) and the €1 billion NATO Innovation Fund, while the SAFE loan facility financed Latvia’s Blaze interceptor order in 2026.

Are Turkish companies part of the European defence AI market?

Yes, as suppliers and partners. STM exported KARGU and ALPAGU loitering munitions with AI image processing to an EU and NATO member in January 2026, Baykar and Leonardo demonstrated M-346FA control of an uncrewed KIZILELMA in June 2026 under their LBA Systems venture, and ASELSAN and HAVELSAN market AI-assisted fire control and UGV systems, the latter still at trial stage.

Sources

• Defense News: Helsing raises $1.8 billion in Europe’s biggest defense-startup round (July 2026)
• The Defense Post: Quantum Systems raises $1.2B to scale autonomous defense systems (July 2026)
• Tekever: Series D of US$580 million at US$6.4 billion valuation (September 2026)
• UK Defence Equipment & Support: New Tekever AR5 drones to equip British Army (July 2026)
• Defense News: Once-reluctant Germany goes big on one-way attack drones (February 2026)
• Breaking Defense: Germany’s Helsing, HENSOLDT team up on autonomous systems for Euro CCA (February 2026)
• Shephard: Saab and Helsing hail world-first as Gripen E flies with Centaur AI agent (June 2025)
• Naval Today: Naval Group backs Thales’ cortAIx to tackle AI integration in defense systems (February 2026)
• EDR Magazine: Leonardo unveils Michelangelo Dome (December 2025)
• ICEYE: ICEYE and Rheinmetall win major contract worth billions for space reconnaissance (December 2025)
• Defense News: ICEYE sees role as Europe’s defense space-intelligence linchpin (November 2025)
• The Defense Post: Rheinmetall publishes tools for integrating systems with Battlesuite (September 2026)
• Defence Industry Europe: Indra tests AI threat assessment and dynamic route planning under EDF programme (August 2026)
• MBDA: MBDA start-up NEODE Systems gets first contract (June 2025)
• Comand AI: €32 million Series A to scale AI-native command-and-control platform across NATO (June 2026)
• Auterion: Auterion and SkyFall to ship 50,000 Shrike strike drones to Ukraine’s front lines (July 2026)
• Unmanned Airspace: Cambridge Aerospace raises USD 300M for interceptor development and expansion (August 2026)
• Janes: Latvia orders more Blaze interceptor UAVs under framework agreement with Origin Robotics (May 2026)
• Alpine Eagle: Scaling counter-drone production as European demand accelerates (March 2026)
• Defence Industry Europe: ARX Robotics secures EUR 31 million Series A (April 2025)
• Milrem Robotics: Newsroom, PGZ cooperation at MSPO and Hanwha Systems MoU (September 2026)
• TechCrunch: Anduril raises $5B, doubles valuation to $61B (May 2026)
• The Register: Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact (September 2025)
• Janes: NATO agrees sole-source procurement of Palantir’s Maven (April 2025)
• Computer Weekly: UK MoD awards more than two dozen contracts for AI targeting systems (March 2026)
• NATO Innovation Fund / Dealroom: European defence, security and resilience startups raise record $8.7B in 2025 (February 2026)
• Defence Industry Europe: European Commission approves €1 billion EDF work programme (December 2025)
• EDR Magazine: NATO DIANA announces largest-ever cohort of 150 innovators for 2026 (December 2025)
• Research in Germany / Cyberagentur: AI training under fire, RSML programme enters phase 4 (January 2026)
• Ministère des Armées: Sébastien Lecornu lance la stratégie ministérielle sur l’intelligence artificielle (March 2024)
• Janes: STM secures first European export of Kargu and Alpagu loitering munitions (January 2026)
• FlightGlobal: Leonardo, Baykar pair M-346FA with uncrewed Kizilelma for teaming demonstration (June 2026)
• Anadolu Agency: Türkiye’s Aselsan unveils new Korkut air defense system with smart munitions (September 2025)
• Breaking Defense: Havelsan unveils Barkan 3 unmanned ground vehicle, to be part of autonomous swarm (May 2026)