Torsten Reil

The director records of the United Kingdom’s Companies House give his date of birth as October 1973 and his nationality as German.⁠[1]

In a PocketGamer.biz Q&A in 2016 he said that his favorite games as a child were Elite, Chequered Flag and Gunship, all on the ZX Spectrum.⁠[2]

Answering an Engadget questionnaire in 2013, he said that the television series Knight Rider and Airwolf had amazed him when he first discovered them as a child on Dutch television, and that NaturalMotion tries to recreate that sense of wonder with every game.⁠[3]

The alumni interview page of the Department of Biology at the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry records his own account: he read Richard DawkinsRichard DawkinsRichard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and science writer whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene set out a gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme; he was the first Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008 and, through books such as The God Delusion, became a prominent advocate of atheism.Open the full entry’s The Selfish Gene while he was in the army in Germany and decided to apply to the university, although he had not studied biology at school.⁠[4]

He said that he stumbled through the whole interview process very naively, ignorant of anything other than Dawkins’s books, but ended up quite relaxed, which helped a lot; his advice to applicants is not to be too daunted by the interview process.⁠[4]

Asked what he had enjoyed most about the degree, he named the tutorial system and being encouraged to think for himself, working directly with the latest research papers instead of relying only on textbooks, and being able to bring computer simulations into his tutorials and brainstorm crazy ideas; he said that his moral tutor was Professor Jane Langdale, who was there for him in several high-pressure situations.⁠[4]

His final project was on the genetics of maize. He said that the degree taught him to think independently, to organize his ideas and write them down, and to write quickly.⁠[4]

The page states that he completed his degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford in 1998. The biographical note that Engadget printed in 2013 describes the degree as a BA in Biology, and the student newspaper Cherwell in 2014 called him an evolutionary biology graduate.⁠[4][3][5]

He then took a master’s degree at the University of Sussex: on the Oxford Department of Biology page he calls it a master’s in artificial intelligence, while the Engadget note and the author’s note attached to his 2006 article in Computer Graphics World describe a master’s degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems (an MSc, in Engadget’s wording).⁠[4][3][6]

He came back to the University of Oxford for a DPhil in “Complexity in Biological Systems”; the Engadget note has him, before founding NaturalMotion, “researching for a PhD in Complex Systems” in the university’s Zoology department, and TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry has him working on his Ph.D. in Complex Systems in the zoology department.⁠[4][3][7]

In his interview with David SenraDavid SenraDavid Senra is the founder and host of the Founders podcast, on which he reads biographies of entrepreneurs to discuss starting and running businesses and making personal decisions. He began producing the show in 2016, partnered with Colossus in 2022, and in 2025 launched David Senra, a long-form interview show under his own name.Open the full entry he recalled that in 1999 he was studying in the United Kingdom, had just started a PhD in complex systems in biology, and was using genetic algorithms to optimize fully recurrent neural networks; he based the network architecture on central pattern generators, the neural structures that produce rhythmic movement such as walking and the heartbeat, and tried to recreate one for walking.⁠[8][8][8]

To see whether it worked, he connected the network to simple physically simulated four-legged and then two-legged creatures (physics engines, he said, had just started then, with MathEngine, Havok and other companies) and left the program running overnight on what were then very slow computers; the next morning, he recalled, a fully physically simulated two-legged creature walked across the screen, one of what he called the rare “Eureka moments.” In the PocketGamer.biz Q&A of 2016 his version was that the creature took its first few steps and then fell over.⁠[8][8][2][9]

He said that at the time he expected to become a scientist and to stay in biology doing software and simulation work, and had no thought of being an entrepreneur; it was the time of the dot-com boom, seeing many other people start companies was inspiring, and he thought of spinning out a company to use the technology as virtual stuntmen in movie scenes.⁠[8][8]

In 2001 he co-founded NaturalMotion in Oxford as a spin-out from the Zoology Department of the University of Oxford; Companies House records show him as a director of NATURALMOTION LIMITED from October 15, 2001.⁠[10][11][5][1]

The author’s note attached to his 2006 article in Computer Graphics World states that he developed NaturalMotion’s core technology together with Colm Massey, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.⁠[6]

He said in the PocketGamer.biz Q&A of 2016 that he founded the company while trying to finish his PhD and that after three months he realized he had to choose one or the other: “I chose NaturalMotion and never regretted it.”⁠[2]

PocketGamer.biz writes that the company at first offered game developers and animation studios a “Motion Capture in a box” solution. MIT Technology Review describes the software as letting an animator give a character, drawn only once, a simulated nervous system, so that the character’s body obeys the laws of physics and reacts automatically to changing scenes.⁠[12][11]

He recalled that the company’s software Endorphin was used in Hollywood films such as The Lord of the Rings, Troy, Spider-Man and Harry Potter; he said that the company charged only about $50,000 per license while the studios did all of their scenes with it, so that it made little money, and that the real value lay in using the technology in real time in games.⁠[8][9]

He published a bylined article, “Animation 2.0,” in the July 2006 issue of Computer Graphics World. The note at the end of the article states that Endorphin creates offline animation about an order of magnitude faster than traditional techniques and is used in the film and games industries, while Euphoria synthesizes 3D character animation in real time on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and is based on University of Oxford research into the control of body movements.⁠[6]

In the article he describes what real-time synthesized animation would mean for games: “every tackle is your tackle; every haymaker is your haymaker.”⁠[6]

He said that Rockstar GamesRockstar GamesRockstar Games is a video game publisher owned by Take-Two Interactive.Open the full entry, a customer for Endorphin, asked whether there was a version that ran in real time on the upcoming consoles, that the answer was “Kind of,” and that a long collaboration followed; Rockstar Games, he said, went on to use the technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Red Dead Redemption and a range of other games.⁠[8][8][9]

Articles in PocketGamer.biz and Game Developer state that the Euphoria animation engine was used in Grand Theft Auto IV, Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is a space-fantasy film and entertainment franchise created by George Lucas and now owned by Lucasfilm, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.Open the full entry: The Force Unleashed and Red Dead Redemption. He said in 2016 that his first significant success in the industry was working with Rockstar Games to integrate the company’s technology into GTA IV; the same PocketGamer.biz article states that the company’s Morpheme and Euphoria were used in Grand Theft Auto IV and in its own Clumsy Ninja.⁠[10][13][2]

Companies House records show him as a director of NATURALMOTION SOFTWARE LIMITED from August 11, 2005, and of NATURALMOTION GAMES LIMITED from October 20, 2006.⁠[1]

At TED2003 he gave a talk titled “Animate characters by evolving them,” explaining how the study of biology can produce natural-looking animated people by building a human from the inside out, starting with bones, muscles and a nervous system.⁠[14]

MIT Technology Review placed him on its 2003 list of young innovators, giving his age as 29; the Engadget note calls the list the TR100. The page states that NaturalMotion’s first product speeds up animation and saves game developers and visual-effects companies money, and that his characters were slated to appear in the Hollywood film Troy; he had also won a British government grant to model the gaits of children with cerebral palsy, to help doctors understand the neurological basis of the disorder.⁠[11][3][6]

He recalled that after the Rockstar Games collaboration the company grew faster than before but still lacked the hockey-stick takeoff he hoped for as a founder, that the chess pieces seemed to be closing in, and that he therefore decided the company should make games itself; the team, he said, was so inspired by Rockstar Games that it thought “how hard can it be,” which turned out to be quite hard but worked in the end. The company acquired a games team and made its first games, and then the iPhone came out.⁠[8][8]

He said in 2016 that he saw the potential of mobile in 2009, when the iPhone was becoming fast enough to run the company’s animation technology; he called AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s creation of the App Store the most significant event in mobile gaming to date.⁠[2]

PocketGamer.biz’s studio profile of 2012 states that the company released Backbreaker Football on mobile in 2009 and that it drew well in excess of 5 million downloads at a premium price, whereas Backbreaker, the American football console game with which it made its debut as a development studio in 2010, was a commercial failure: MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry did not want it on XBLA, so that it had to go to retail with a larger scope and a short window, and it had bugs at launch. The lessons he drew were “only ship when you’re ready,” “focus innovation on one or two key areas” and “never-ever touch retail.”⁠[10]

The company followed with Backbreaker 2: Vengeance, NFLNFLThe NFL (National Football League) is a U.S. professional American football league of 32 clubs. Founded in 1920 as the APFA and renamed in 1922, it is organized into the AFC and NFC, with the season culminating in the Super Bowl.Open the full entry Rivals, Icebreaker Hockey and a licensed version of Jenga; the profile states that the first six paid titles together returned 500 percent on investment.⁠[10]

On pricing, he recalled that the company’s first games were sold at 99 cents, the lowest price possible, at a time when others in the industry said a mobile game had to cost at least $5 for people to feel it had value; he said that all he wanted was to maximize revenue and that he believed price elasticity was large enough for the lowest price to bring far more players and more money. When free-to-play arrived, by his account, the company made the first big free-to-play 3D game, giving it away and charging elsewhere.⁠[8][8]

The company then moved almost entirely to free-to-play development, beginning with the animal care game My Horse; PocketGamer.biz states that it reached 5 million downloads within three months and 500,000 daily users, and had well over 11 million downloads by November 2012.⁠[10]

He said that all of the company’s earlier games had been about characters, because that was its technology, and that, being really into cars, he very much wanted to make a drag racing game, a car racing game without any steering, which became CSR Racing.⁠[8][8]

CSR Racing was developed by Boss Alien, demonstrated in the WWDC 2012 keynote and launched on iOS in June 2012; PocketGamer.biz states that it took in $12 million in its first month with no spending on marketing or user acquisition. He said in 2014 that the company had not thought such a figure possible on the App Store at the time; in the 2026 interview he called it the biggest game of all time on the iPhone at that point and the one that gave the company its hockey stick.⁠[10][15][8]

He recalled standing in the shower in the United Kingdom at one point and thinking that he would like to make the number one top-grossing game in the world; it was, he said, just a goal.⁠[8]

PocketGamer.biz wrote in November 2012 that in the preceding year or so the company had opened a London studio, acquired Boss Alien in Brighton and hired across its San Francisco office and a new Oxford headquarters; Companies House records show him as a director of BOSS ALIEN LIMITED from July 5, 2012.⁠[10][1]

On funding, the profile states that the company’s most recent round was $11 million from Benchmark Capital, which brought Mitch Lasky onto the board, and that outside investment totaled $19 million; TechCrunch states that Balderton Capital, formerly Benchmark Europe, was the company’s first venture investor.⁠[10][7]

Clumsy Ninja was announced at Apple’s keynote for the fifth-generation iPod touch and released in November 2013, and drew 10 million downloads in its first week. TechCrunch states that Apple featured CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja on stage at its WWDC and iPhone 5 keynotes.⁠[10][5][15][7]

On January 30, 2014, in the release announcing its results for the fourth quarter and full year of 2013, Zynga announced an agreement to acquire NaturalMotion for about $527 million, based on Zynga’s closing price on January 29, 2014: $391 million in cash plus about 39.8 million shares of Zynga Class A common stock.⁠[16]

The release describes NaturalMotion as having about 260 employees in Oxford, Brighton, London and San Francisco, names him as its chief executive officer and co-founder, and quotes him: “We’ve reached our first milestones – creating #1 top-grossing and top-free titles – on our own.”⁠[16]

The Form 8-K that Zynga signed the same day states that the buyer was its wholly owned subsidiary Zynga Game International Limited under a Share Purchase Agreement entered into on January 30, 2014; that $50 million of the consideration would be held in third-party escrow for fifteen months; that about 11.6 million of the roughly 39.8 million consideration shares would go to continuing employees and vest over three years; and that the closing conditions included the continued employment of NaturalMotion’s founder, its key employees and substantially all of its other employees.⁠[17]

The same release announced that Zynga was cutting about 314 jobs worldwide, roughly 15 percent of its workforce.⁠[16]

The TechCrunch article describes him as a perfectionist who will delay a game for months to get the details right.⁠[7]

Cherwell quotes him after the announcement: “NaturalMotion set out to make games that wow millions of people”; he said that after talking with Zynga’s leadership it quickly became clear that they shared this vision, and that Zynga’s expertise would help the CSR and Clumsy Ninja franchises to grow.⁠[5]

Companies House records show that he resigned as a director of NATURALMOTION LIMITED on February 11, 2014, and of NATURALMOTION SOFTWARE LIMITED and NATURALMOTION GAMES LIMITED on May 1, 2014; in these filings his country of residence is given as the United Kingdom.⁠[1]

In April 2014 he said that NaturalMotion “wasn’t for sale” and that before meeting Zynga’s chief executive, Don Mattrick, he had had only an outside view of Zynga; he said: “The point of the deal is to keep our culture and that’s putting quality first.” He added that the company knew user experience well but had a lot to learn about live operations, and that it was then focused on two franchises, CSR Racing and Clumsy Ninja.⁠[18]

In the same interview he said that he had once doubted that Android could be a high-quality platform and had changed his mind: devices could be better filtered, fragmentation was “less of an issue,” and monetization on Android had progressed far enough for the company not to need a strategy different from the one it used on iOS; Clumsy Ninja had just been released on Google PlayGoogle PlayGoogle Play is a digital content distribution service operated by Google, centered on the Google Play Store, the app store for Android devices. Its predecessor, Android Market, launched in October 2008 alongside the first Android phone, and in March 2012 it merged with Google Music and the Google eBookstore and was renamed Google Play. As the main distribution channel for Android apps, its commissions, billing rules, and review practices have drawn controversy, including the Epic Games antitrust lawsuit in the United States and penalties under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.Open the full entry, and CSR Classics had launched on Android earlier that month. He said that the racing genre had room to grow, “We’re still learning what the players want”; he called Clumsy Ninja “an interactive character” and not a game, said “It will be big,” and said that it was never designed to monetize like CSR Racing, that children and families would play it, and that “We take that responsibility seriously.” The article states that the most expensive in-app purchase in Clumsy Ninja was $29.99, against $99.99 in the CSR Racing games, and that the company licensed Euphoria to console developers but kept it for its own games on mobile.⁠[18]

PocketGamer.biz in 2016 called it Zynga’s biggest purchase ever.⁠[2]

He spoke on stage at GameHorizon in Newcastle, in a talk that PocketGamer.biz covered on May 7, 2014, saying that My Horse had reached 35 million downloads, none of them through user acquisition; he said that the iPhone, more than any other platform, had disrupted everything, urged developers to make high-quality games with the same impact, and said: “when you’re done polishing, polish some more.”⁠[15]

In the talk he explained that the company made My Horse because “very few people had touched this kind of genre”; critics had sniggered and expected something pink, and the team chose a more realistic approach. For CSR Racing, the company simplified racing to drag racing and concentrated on making players feel that they owned real cars. He argued that user acquisition can keep good games out of the top charts, that it was much harder for a good game to reach the top than two years earlier, and that the only answer was to make really disruptive games of high quality; he closed by saying that developers have to be proud of what they are making.⁠[15]

On June 30, 2016, PocketGamer.biz ran a Q&A with him in its “Hall of Fame” series, noting that NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing 2 and Dawn of Titans were due that year. He said that he was proudest of having built a team that turned the idea of fully interactive characters into reality, and of the company’s perseverance; he expected new genres to emerge after a period of stagnation, named Slither.io as his favorite recent game, and hoped to innovate on the concept of “social presence.”⁠[2]

In December 2016 NaturalMotion’s action strategy game Dawn of Titans launched on Android and iOS after about 21 months in soft launch; it runs on the company’s own Echo engine. He said that the advantage of an in-house engine is full control and the drawback is that it takes a long time, and that this was one game in a portfolio, not a make-or-break game; he said that the soft launches of both CSR Racing 2 and Dawn of Titans had been extended and that Zynga had not forced an early release.⁠[19]

In May 2017 he left NaturalMotion. PocketGamer.biz’s article of May 4 states that he was leaving on amicable terms 15 years after co-founding the company and that David Byrne, NaturalMotion’s chief operating officer, would serve as interim chief executive.⁠[12][4]

Zynga’s chief executive, Frank Gibeau, said: “We respect and support his decision to take a personal break after more than 15 years with NaturalMotion,” thanked him for his contributions to Zynga over the previous three years, and credited him with building a great team and launching franchises such as CSR, Dawn of Titans and Clumsy Ninja.⁠[13]

He later recalled that when he left NaturalMotion and Zynga he did not think he would start another company: after 15 years he was pretty exhausted; his energy came back in about three months, but it was another two or three years before he wanted to start something again.⁠[8][8]

After leaving he turned to investing. The Oxford Department of Biology alumni page describes him as “Now in investment” and records him as saying that he invests in start-ups focused on artificial intelligence and sits on the boards of FiveAI and Oxford Nanoimaging.⁠[4]

His TechCrunch author biography describes him as an active technology and biotech investor.⁠[20]

He said that when he left he was reasonably pleased with himself and thought that everything had gone quite well in the end; only in the two or three years afterwards, especially once he began angel investing, did he reflect and realize that there was a lot at NaturalMotion he should have done better: he had not dealt with performance management as he should have, had not taken the hiring of great engineers seriously enough, and had not thought enough about how to build and grow a leadership team and bring in the right executives at the right time.⁠[8][8]

The Swedish business outlet Realtid wrote in 2025 that the sale of NaturalMotion made him wealthy and laid the foundation for Helsing.⁠[21]

He recalled that he had invested in Niklas Köhler’s company in Munich, which was solving artificial intelligence problems for Europe’s legacy defence primes; having invested without knowing much about defence, he was advised to meet Gundbert Scherf, who was then responsible for aerospace and defence at McKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry. The two met in a café in Berlin, hit it off and within 30 minutes thought that they should start the company together; they went to see Niklas Köhler, who felt the same, and within a few days the three decided to start Helsing.⁠[8][8][22]

He said that these conversations took place at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 and that the company was founded in March 2021; each of the three had independently concluded that Europe needed a new defence company. He said that he would not have started another company had he not met his two co-founders: a defence company has to deal with technology, politics, export law and much else at the same time, which is very hard for a single founder.⁠[8][8][8]

TechCrunch’s 2021 article states that Gundbert Scherf had been a partner at McKinsey and the architect of the Bundeswehr’s Cyber and Information Domain Command and of the digital directorate-general at the German Ministry of Defence, and was Helsing’s co-founder and chief operating officer and president, and that Niklas Köhler, its chief product officer, is a theoretical physicist who has published work on artificial intelligence in Nature, Nature Communications and Nature Machine Intelligence; the article also names the chief technology officer, Robert Fink, who came from PalantirPalantirPalantir is a U.S. enterprise software company founded in 2003 that provides data and artificial intelligence platforms including Gotham, Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and AIP, serving government and commercial organizations. The company went public through a direct listing in 2020 and now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PLTR.Open the full entry, where one passage of the article has him as chief architect and another as a software engineer, and the chief executive of Helsing U.K., Nick Elliott, formerly director-general of the U.K. Vaccine Taskforce.⁠[22]

On their motives, he said that the three were particularly worried by Europe’s reaction to the taking of Crimea in 2014, believed that something bigger would follow, and feared that Europe would be heavily dependent on other countries for its defence; the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, he said, already had forward-looking defence companies such as AndurilAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry and Palantir, focused on artificial intelligence, cheaper and abundant hardware and mass manufacturing, whereas Europe had nothing: “if we don’t start the company then no one else will.”⁠[8][8][21][9]

He said that starting a European defence technology company was very unpopular at the time, in the founders’ social circles and with banks: some people close to the company were debanked and another had difficulty getting credit because the company was involved in defence, though he himself was not affected; under the banks’ ESG rules of the time, he said, the defence of a democratic society was put in the same bucket as pornography, gambling and smoking.⁠[8][8][8]

He said that raising money for defence was very difficult in 2021, that no venture capital firm wanted to talk to them and that in the end they did not even try, raising money only from individuals and family offices; the seed round came in March 2021 and was, as he remembered it, €8 million, and Daniel EkDaniel EkDaniel Ek is a Swedish entrepreneur and a co-founder of Spotify, and has served as Spotify’s executive chairman since January 2026. He also co-founded Neko Health with Hjalmar Nilsonne and helped found the investment firm Prima Materia.Open the full entry took part in it. TechCrunch states that Helsing closed a seed round with European investors earlier in 2021. Realtid writes that he was able to put in a large sum himself, while most funds avoided defence companies because of ESG rules.⁠[8][8][22][21][9]

On November 9, 2021, TechCrunch published Helsing’s Series A financing: Helsing had raised €102.5 million in total as part of its Series A, and Prima Materia, Daniel Ek’s investment company, would put €100 million into the company, with Daniel Ek joining the board alongside him and the two other co-founders; the article states that Helsing was claiming a valuation above €400 million, had a team of more than 70 and offices in London, Munich and Berlin, and that his title was co-founder and chief executive.⁠[22]

He said in the announcement: “We founded Helsing with the conviction that liberal democratic values are worth defending.”⁠[22]

The article describes Helsing’s product at the time as a real-time software platform that processes data from multiple sensors directly on vehicles and systems; the company said that it would focus on serving countries that meet the highest democratic standards and planned a French entity, as a third home market, in early 2022.⁠[22]

By his account, about three months after the seed round Daniel Ek asked how much they needed, and he answered that ideally it would be €100 million; he said that he had not drawn up a specific budget and that the figure simply felt about right. Daniel Ek, he said, had the same level of conviction as the three founders, and the deal came together quickly; he had known Daniel Ek beforehand, Daniel Ek had known of the idea and been with the company from the beginning, he regards him as closer to a co-founder than an investor, and being seen publicly to invest in such a company was a big commitment for Daniel Ek.⁠[8][8][8]

He said that the war in Ukraine began only 11 months after the company was started and that public sentiment then shifted. He also said that a few months into the company the three decided to go full throttle, to crash completely or be very successful with nothing in between, and that they will never sell the company.⁠[8][8]

With the €100 million, he said, the company adopted an approach that came from Gundbert Scherf: to go straight for “programs of record,” official government programs that are in the budget and usually large, and to hold the direct relationship with the government instead of working as a subcontractor; for a small company this was almost impossible at the time, he said, but with that money it could afford to lose the first two or three it went for.⁠[8][8]

In June 2023 the German government selected Helsing and Saab to provide AI-enabled electronic warfare capabilities for the Eurofighter jet.⁠[23]

He recalled that the company applied for a large program of record in Germany, the electronic warfare upgrade for the Eurofighter: anti-aircraft radars had increasingly become software-defined and shape-shifting, the old approaches no longer worked, and Helsing recovered the ability to interpret those radars with an approach based on deep learning; he said that the company and its partner Saab won against many other consortia as the “dark horse,” with a high probability of failure, two years and four months after the company’s founding, which he believes made it the fastest to go from founding to a program of record.⁠[8][8][23][9]

Looking for large programs of record to which the company can contribute something differentiated has since, he said, become the blueprint for almost everything it does.⁠[8]

On September 14, 2023, TechCrunch published Helsing’s Series B: €209 million ($223 million), led by General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry, with Saab joining as a strategic investor; the article gives a pre-money valuation said to be €1.5 billion, which would put the post-money figure at more than €1.7 billion.⁠[23]

He said in the announcement: “This funding round is a vote of confidence in Europe.” The article adds that in the same month Helsing and its consortium partners won the contract to provide the AI backbone for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) program.⁠[23]

In July 2024 Helsing raised a €450 million Series C from General Catalyst, Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry, AccelAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry, Saab, Lightspeed Ventures, Plural and Greenoaks. Sifted puts the company’s valuation in that round at about €5 billion; the Forbes article gives $480 million from General Catalyst and Accel and a valuation of $4.5 billion, and puts the company’s earlier funding at $325 million.⁠[24][25][26]

In December 2024 Helsing announced the HX-2 strike drone. The Forbes article notes that the company had until then insisted that it made only software: at a technology conference in London he had said, “We are not a hardware company. We’re a software company. That’s all we do,” and at another event in 2022, “It’s specifically about adding capabilities to existing assets.”⁠[26]

The article states that the HX-2 has a range of 50 miles and can hunt in swarms and destroy armored vehicles, and, on the word of people close to the deal, that a cheaper wooden model, the HF-1, would be made in Ukraine by the local start-up Terminal Autonomy. Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, announced in November 2024 that 4,000 drones equipped with Helsing’s AI software would be donated to Ukraine, starting in December. The article adds that he had said to BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry that the company planned to produce tens of thousands of the devices a year and that the drone “has the capability to create a deterrence level that currently just isn’t feasible”; that Helsing is a partner of European arms manufacturers such as Rheinmetall and Airbus; and that its AI had been used to upgrade the radar system of Saab’s Gripen fighter jets and the Luftwaffe’s Eurofighters.⁠[26]

The same article has Florian Seibel, founder of the drone company Quantum Systems, saying that Torsten Reil “was all in on software” and had held that building hardware was a race to the bottom on price; it relays from Bloomberg that Florian Seibel criticized Helsing’s new drone in a LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry post that was later deleted: “The war in Ukraine is deadly and shouldn’t be misused for marketing purposes.” An unnamed founder of a defence start-up said: “To sell software without a hardware product is almost impossible.” Kateryna Bondar, a fellow with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the biggest challenge for drones in Ukraine is electronic warfare, with jamming and spoofing.⁠[26]

Helsing’s product page gives the HX-2 a weight of 12 kg, a top speed of 220 km/h and a range of up to 100 km, and states: “A human operator stays in or on the loop for all critical decisions.” He said in 2026 that its explosive payload is 2 to 4 kg or even larger.⁠[27][8][9]

The company calls its production sites Resilience Factories; the first, RF-1, is in southern Germany, was completed in December 2024 and has an initial monthly capacity of more than 1,000 HX-2s.⁠[28]

On June 4, 2025, Helsing announced a binding agreement to acquire Grob Aircraft SE from H3 Aerospace GmbH & Co KG; Grob Aircraft is based in Tussenhausen, Bavaria, Germany, has about 275 employees and owns an airfield. The deal was subject to regulatory approvals and its commercial terms were kept confidential; the release quotes Gundbert Scherf as co-founder and co-chief executive.⁠[29]

He explained the reasoning behind the acquisition: working with primes is usually slow, and a partnership in which Helsing supplied the AI and a prime supplied the jet would have taken too long, so the company decided to buy an aircraft manufacturer outside Munich with its own runway, hangars and full aircraft manufacturing capabilities and to build its own fighter jet.⁠[8][8]

On June 11, 2025, Helsing announced that Centaur, its AI agent for air combat, had completed test flights on a Saab Gripen E above the Baltic Sea on May 28 and June 3: once switched on by the pilot, Centaur took control of the aircraft, flew beyond-visual-range combat maneuvers and gave fire commands to the pilot against a second Gripen flown by a human; a safety pilot could retake control at any time. The release states that Saab and Helsing went from concept to live flights in less than six months and that the work is part of the future fighter concept studies commissioned by the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV).⁠[30]

He recalled that this grew out of something close to a science experiment begun two years earlier: the company set itself the task of training a superhuman fighter pilot for beyond-visual-range combat, using reinforcement learning and a very fast simulator (running, he said, at 25,000 times real-time speed), essentially the approach DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry had used for AlphaGo and AlphaStar; Antoine Bordes, who leads the research, had come from MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, he noted, where he had co-headed Facebook AI Research. The system, he said, won first in the company’s own simulator, then in an official simulator belonging to a big prime, and in 2025 flew three air combat scenarios in a real aircraft above the Baltic Sea; that, he said, was the point at which they realized that it worked in the real world.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][31][9]

He described beyond-visual-range combat as “chess in the sky”: usually two aircraft against two, far apart, switching radars on and off, firing missiles and evading them. Active pilots, he said, had assured the company that this was the last bastion of air combat and that nothing would replace human intuition, whereas the AI proved much better, because it explores the space of possibilities far more efficiently than a human who learns from a textbook and in flight school; the company regularly flies against pilots of the Eurofighter, the Rafale and the Gripen, he said, and the system can now also work in swarms. This convinced him that crewed fighter jets will be very difficult to deploy in future, because they will face swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][9]

On June 17, 2025, Helsing announced a €600 million Series D led by Prima Materia, with the existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst and Saab taking part and BDT & MSD Partners as a new investor; the announcement states that the round was subject to certain approvals and describes Daniel Ek as founder of Prima Materia and chairman of Helsing.⁠[24]

Sifted puts Helsing’s valuation in the round at €12 billion, a figure first given by the Financial TimesFinancial TimesThe Financial Times (FT) is a London-based English-language business and financial news organization, known for its salmon-pink newspaper and its motto “Without Fear and Without Favour.” It was owned successively by the British Pearson group and Japan’s Nikkei Inc., and today digital subscriptions are its main source of revenue.Open the full entry and confirmed by Sifted; the article adds that the company had that year unveiled its first factory in Germany with the aim of producing 6,000 additional drones for Ukraine, had agreed a partnership with the French AI company Mistral to develop large language models for defence, and works with the governments of Germany, the United Kingdom and Estonia.⁠[25]

In July 2025 Helsing held its first press day at its Munich office, where he and Gundbert Scherf briefed journalists as co-chief executives. Resilience Media’s long article states that he said the company raised its seed round from European investors and then made sure to bring more EU investors into later rounds; the article states that the company is consequently still 80 percent owned by EU investors, and gives total funding of nearly €1.4 billion and a staff of 600, double the number of a year earlier.⁠[32]

On a listing, he said: “we’re not planning an IPO right now,” adding that the company should stay independent, which it can do privately or on public markets, and should not be sold to another company: “It can’t happen through a trade sale.” He held that it now costs “a couple of billion” to build the right teams and that if Europe waited it would fall too far behind to catch up; he also said “we can’t wait for government to give us R&D contracts,” and that Vladimir Putin, by his estimate, refurbishes or makes about 1,500 tanks every year and puts the large majority into storage: “we have to assume that he intends to use them somehow, and probably not in Ukraine.”⁠[32]

Challenged about a possible lack of focus, he and Gundbert Scherf answered that each domain overlaps significantly on the technology side; Niklas Köhler listed the shared foundation: the way data is stored, the way it is moved across a network, command and control, and the inference engine. He and Gundbert Scherf described traditional defence as centered on very complex platforms, and the article sets against it software-defined defence, in which sensors and autonomy drive the effect; the two were concerned that Europe’s many small firms, each working on a separate piece, would be overtaken, and Niklas Köhler said that such a firm usually “gets annihilated” by a U.S. company able to put far more resources into the problem.⁠[32]

He recalled that in July and August 2025 the company took production of the HX-2 from dozens a month to a baseline of 1,000, and that its small existing factory can surge to 3,000 a month; this, he said, is entirely different from producing a few dozen, and the supply chain, the way the drone is designed, quality control and the tracking of every single step all had to be rethought.⁠[8][9]

On September 25, 2025, Helsing showed the CA-1 Europa, an autonomous uncrewed combat aircraft, for the first time at the Bavarian site of its subsidiary Grob Aircraft. Breaking Defense states that it is in the three-to-five-ton class, reaches high subsonic speeds, can operate singly or in a swarm and will carry Centaur; Helsing called the exhibit a full-size design study and aimed at frontline operations within the following four years.⁠[33]

He said in August 2026 that the first prototypes can carry a safety pilot, because the test flights take place over built-up Bavaria, which he compared to the safety drivers in the early rollouts of Waymo and other companies, and that this required no change to the design. The company, he said, wants to build many hundreds of these fighter jets; the aircraft is designed to take off from makeshift airstrips such as roads and motorways, because air bases are obvious targets. He added that some governments and militaries are still in denial about what a future conflict will look like: in many cases crewed fighter jets will no longer be able to take off.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][9]

In October 2025, in a discussion with Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director of General Catalyst, at the Resilience Conference, he said that Europa “can be built in Europe and should be built in Europe” and that “We should develop homegrown systems that we control,” adding that the degree of autonomy that people are prepared to accept is “something that we need to be able to control.” The Resilience Media article calls him co-chief executive of Helsing and states that strengthening the region’s sovereignty has been part of Helsing’s mission.⁠[34]

He said that there had been incursions into the airspace of various countries, including Poland and Estonia, that the drone incursions “has started to sharpen people’s minds,” that nations felt more urgency about speeding up procurement than about a year earlier, and that larger defence budgets were already producing new contracts; when Helsing started, he added, it was not possible to raise money from European venture capital firms, whereas now “almost everyone wants to go into defence.”⁠[34]

On February 25, 2026, lawmakers on the German parliament’s budget committee approved contracts worth €268 million ($316 million) each for two start-ups, Stark Defence and Helsing, to supply the Virtus and HX-2 loitering munitions respectively. Defense News states that contractual options could add €1 billion to each deal, provided the systems prove technologically mature and lawmakers agree to additional purchases; as a first step the weapons are destined to equip Germany’s armored brigade in Lithuania in 2027, lawmakers attached reporting requirements to the approved spending plan, and cancellation clauses allow the government to walk away if a manufacturer fails qualification tests.⁠[35]

In the interview of August 2026 he said that the company had just closed “a 1 billion framework contract” in Germany; the large strike drone contracts, he said, went through in record time with political support and the support of the procurement agency, the pressure now is on companies to deliver quickly, and the bottleneck is not manufacturing speed but the big programs that have yet to come; they need to come in all the Western countries, he said, and there will be some in Asia as well.⁠[8][8][8]

On April 14, 2026, Helsing announced that Anita Szarek would become chief financial officer on May 11; the release quotes him with the title of Helsing co-chief executive and co-founder. He said that she “combines financial leadership and strategic thinking.”⁠[36]

On June 1 Helsing presented Area 9, its advanced research division led by the chief scientist Antoine Bordes, and launched RX-1, a robotics research platform designed and manufactured in Europe, with the group of Marco Hutter at ETH Zurich and INRIA Paris as its first academic partners; the release states that Area 9’s debut project was Centaur and that its next focus is robotics.⁠[31]

On June 8 Helsing announced the appointment of Frank Dirksen to the newly created post of chief commercial officer, starting in June; the release states that at Rheinmetall he first led the chief executive’s office and then held leadership roles including chief executive and country lead of Rheinmetall South Africa, and that he had also worked as a management consultant and served for fifteen years in the German Armed Forces.⁠[37]

On June 10, at the International Aerospace Exhibition, Helsing presented an electronic warfare variant, the CA-1 Electronic Attack (CA-1EA), and said that the attack variant would from then on be designated the CA-1KA; the release states that the maiden flight of the attack version of the CA-1 Europa is planned for early 2027, that initial operating capability is planned for 2029 for the CA-1KA and 2031 for the CA-1EA, and that the aircraft is being developed and manufactured by the subsidiary Grob Aircraft in southern Germany.⁠[38]

On July 13, 2026, Helsing announced that it had raised $1.8 billion in a Series E valuing it at $18 billion. The release states that new and existing investors took part, including Dragoneer Investment Group, Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry, Disruptive, Iconiq, Growth Equity at Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry Alternatives, JPMorganChaseJPMorgan Chase & Co.JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company headquartered in New York that operates investment banking, consumer and small business financial services, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands; its roots trace back to the Manhattan Company of 1799.Open the full entry, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), General Catalyst, Plural and Stepstone; it adds that Helsing’s existing investors include Prima Materia, Accel and Greenoaks, and that the company remains predominantly European-owned.⁠[39]

The release states that the board is unchanged: Daniel Ek and Tom Enders are co-chairmen, and Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and Denis Mercier are members alongside the founders.⁠[39]

On July 14 Helsing announced that it had selected West VirginiaWest VirginiaWest Virginia is a U.S. state formed from the western counties of Virginia during the Civil War; its capital and largest city is Charleston. It became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Its population was 1,793,716 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry for its first Resilience Factory in the United States, which once fully operational is to be capable of producing more than 2,000 HX-2s a month; the release states that the U.S. Army tested the HX-2 during exercise Flytrap in Lithuania. On July 15 the company appointed Andriy Shevchenko as managing director for Ukraine; that release states that Helsing has been present in Ukraine since early 2022 and that thousands of HX-2s have been deployed to the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the beginning of 2026.⁠[40][41]

On August 26, 2026, David Senra published a conversation with him on his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel under the title “Building Defense Technologies to Protect Democracies | Torsten Reil, Helsing”; the episode page on David Senra’s website describes him as the co-founder and co-chief executive of Helsing. David Senra said in the episode that a few years earlier the two had had a fierce argument at a dinner at Daniel Ek’s house, that he had left thinking they hated each other, and that they had since become friends; he also mentioned that the two had raced cars together in Sweden, and that a few months earlier he, Torsten Reil and Michael DellMichael DellMichael Dell is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies. Starting from a direct-sales personal computer business, he led the company’s take-private, its acquisition of EMC, and its return to the public market, and with his wife Susan Dell co-founded a foundation that funds education, health, and children’s investment accounts.Open the full entry had talked about Helsing’s acquisition of an aircraft manufacturer at Michael Dell’s house.⁠[8][8][8][8][9]

The conversation opens with the position of tanks and artillery on the battlefield in Ukraine and moves on to strike drones and deterrence, autonomous flight and resistance to jamming, future war as a battle of material between machines, why he started another company after leaving NaturalMotion, the founding and early funding of Helsing, European founders who retire after selling their companies, and the company’s mission.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

He then discusses the strategy of going for government programs of record and the Eurofighter electronic warfare program, what he brought from NaturalMotion, the autonomous fighter jet CA-1 Europa and the AI pilot Centaur, the ethics of autonomous weapons, the change in German attitudes to defence, the mass production of the HX-2, supply chains and the Resilience Factories.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

The topics of the second half are hiring and moving people out, the quarterly performance calibration, what he looks for in an interview, talent density and the company’s values, how he felt when its products were first used in Ukraine, deterrence and human conflict, entrepreneurs who come from the games industry, the founding of NaturalMotion and its pricing, and his view of the culture of commentary on social media.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

On October 20, 2026, Helsing announced a commercial partnership with Destinus, a European strike and air defence systems company, to offer joint solutions to NATONATONATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an alliance founded on the North Atlantic Treaty signed in 1949, with collective defence as its core principle. Its political and administrative centre is in Brussels, Belgium.Open the full entry and allied armed forces, and said that it would take part in Destinus’s latest funding round.⁠[42]

On October 26, in a release datelined Berlin, Helsing unveiled Contra, an AI-controlled autonomous air defence system, together with two interceptors that it is developing: the jet-powered AD-1 Inferno and the AD-2 Ambush, a missile with a solid rocket motor, a speed of Mach 2.5 and a range of more than 20 km; the release quotes Niklas Köhler as co-founder and president.⁠[43]

The education listed on his LinkedIn profile: a BA in biological sciences from the University of Oxford, October 1995 to July 1998, with the grade First Class; an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex, September 1998 to September 1999, with the grade Distinction; a PhD in Complexity in Biological Systems at the University of Oxford, October 1999 to November 2001, marked “dropped out to start NaturalMotion”; and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2017.⁠[44]

The experience it lists: founder and chief executive of NaturalMotion from November 2001 to June 2017, in Oxford, England; and co-founder and co-chief executive of Helsing since March 2021, in Munich, Germany.⁠[44]

In the Engadget questionnaire of August 2013 he said that he was then playing War Thunder (with an Oculus Rift), Real Racing 3 and World of Tanks, that the game he most looked forward to was GTA V, and that he planned to buy a PS3 and a Samsung television for it, having left his previous home setup behind in a move; he also praised the niche game Toca Builders for its controls and world-building.⁠[3]

The book that influenced him most, he said, was Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, for what it taught him about the algorithms behind natural processes; for animated storytelling he named PixarPixarPixar Animation Studios is a computer animation film studio in Emeryville, California, spun off from Lucasfilm’s Computer Division in 1986; it released the first computer-animated feature, Toy Story, in 1995, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company since 2006, and developed technologies including RenderMan and Universal Scene Description.Open the full entry’s Up; the music he listens to when thinking about big ideas is by Kavinsky, Madeon and Teenage Bad Girl; and his favorite gadget was a heart rate app for the iPhone, which he used to track the effect on him of espresso and of discussions about user interfaces.⁠[3]

He said that he has always ended up doing something slightly different from the mainstream, partly because he has never felt part of his peer group: he did a lot of biology and loved it but never felt part of the biology group and never liked going into the field to watch animals or dissecting them, which is why he did only software and simulation; in games, likewise, he never felt part of the gaming group and its culture.⁠[8]

David Senra said in the episode that he is probably one of the most disagreeable people he knows; he answered that he does not think he is, and simply does not like it when people make excuses.⁠[8][8]

Asked why some of the best entrepreneurs come from gaming, he said that Palmer LuckeyPalmer LuckeyPalmer Luckey (born September 19, 1992) is an American inventor and entrepreneur. He founded Oculus VR and developed an Oculus Rift headset prototype in 2012; Facebook acquired the company in 2014. In 2017 he cofounded defense technology company Anduril Industries. He subsequently established retro-gaming hardware company ModRetro and helped found Erebor, a bank serving the technology industry.Open the full entry arguably did too, being at least very close to the games industry, and that games companies are complex to build because they marry art with technology and have to bring very focused software engineers together with artists who simply want to create something beautiful, which is not unlike the defence industry, where people of very different cultural backgrounds work on complex systems; exposure to defence through games, many of which have a military theme, may be part of it too, he said.⁠[8][8][8][9]

He said that the company’s mission is to protect democracies, that the founders say so to the new starters every month, and that it is a privilege to have a mission so plain; another reason for building Helsing, he said, was to build a big company in Europe, with SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry as the example, and to show that this can be done even in a heavily regulated field such as defence.⁠[8][8][8]

He said that the three founders have different skills: he had started and sold a company and knew how to raise money, Gundbert Scherf is close to the armed forces and understands the political processes, and Niklas Köhler’s background is in artificial intelligence and engineering. Helsing, he said, is now much bigger than NaturalMotion ever was and uncharted territory for him too, so that things have to be thought through from first principles or with people who have built big companies, such as Daniel Ek; he put the headcount at about 1,300.⁠[8][8][9]

He holds that hiring the right individuals, and then curating that group and moving people out, is the most important thing in a company and the source of both its culture and its performance. For that reason the first contract Helsing signed, even before the company was founded, was with a third-party recruitment agency, and the three founders reviewed the recruitment indicators every week for the first year.⁠[8][8][8]

The most important process, he said, is a quarterly performance calibration review: the founders do not review every individual but listen to managers explain the ratings they give their reports and hold the managers accountable for them; where a rating is low, the manager is expected either to help the person improve or to find a way to part. This, he said, gives the whole company the same sense of what good looks like and shows which managers try to protect their teams.⁠[8][8][8]

He said that the founders no longer approve every hire but are pulled in for a second opinion, to interview or to persuade a candidate to join; for key positions the founders sometimes run the hiring from end to end, and Daniel Ek played a very big part in hiring one of the company’s most senior executives. A company like Helsing, he said, has to shed its skin almost every nine months and rethink its processes, how it grows and what kind of leadership it needs.⁠[8][8][8][8]

In an interview he uses no standard set of questions and tries only to find out whether the person is “effortless”: not trying to impress, deeply knowledgeable about what they are talking about, and still curious and of high agency; about 10 minutes, he said, is enough to get a feeling, and senior candidates are interviewed by all the founders. At Helsing, he said, his first impression has not yet been proved wrong, whereas at NaturalMotion it was wrong three times, and he still knows the names.⁠[8][8][8][8]

He said that people’s character and performance are not set in stone and that in larger companies it can be harder for someone with tenfold potential to realize it; the very best people are few but make a disproportionate difference, so that it is worth finding them and giving them a home in which they can thrive. Helsing, he said, does this systematically and makes exceptions for such people, in ways he did not want to describe in detail; he feels grateful, he said, to the key employees who have turned projects around, which is often the work of very small teams or of particular individuals.⁠[8][8][8][8]

He recalled that at a gathering of the whole company some 18 to 24 months earlier a group of employees proposed rewriting the company’s values, and that the session, which he had been dreading, went easily: the top value was “whatever it takes,” and another was “the truth is in the field.”⁠[8][8][8]

He summarized the company’s approach to products: build hardware that is good enough, design it for mass production and reach economies of scale through numbers; absorb into software as much as possible of the complexity that legacy primes put into exquisite hardware, with simpler sensors and wider manufacturing tolerances, and regain the accuracy through AI algorithms and software recalibration.⁠[8][8]

He said that a country that wants to buy and build Helsing’s hardware can have a factory on its own territory, which Helsing can run, and can build up a supply chain as domestic as it needs; these factories, he explained, are not one big plant that is an easy target but can be distributed and even placed underground, as Helsing’s own is. The company wants to work with allies, he said, but in some fields countries require everything to be national, the United Kingdom, for instance, being very particular about data in the maritime domain, so that the degree of localization has to be something that can be dialed up and down.⁠[8][8][8][8]

He said that the company runs ethics workshops, has deployment guides for its technologies and has to think carefully about matters such as proliferation; when the company was founded, he said, journalists asked almost only about killer robots, autonomy, red lines and whether a human was in the loop, questions the founders were happy to answer, whereas now no journalist asks them.⁠[8][8]

He thinks that the era of tanks is probably over, and likewise that of artillery: in Ukraine they are easily found by reconnaissance drones and destroyed by FPV drones or larger strike drones, and both are high-priority targets.⁠[8][8][8]

He said that about a year earlier he had argued that a very large number of strike drones at a border is a strong deterrent, a remark that was deemed provocative and got him into some trouble, and that he still holds the view: if the other side turned up with 3,000 tanks, 100,000 strike drones able to navigate without GPS and find their own targets would destroy them within hours.⁠[8][8]

He holds that drones have to be AI-controlled and autonomous, with a human supervising them and remaining in or on the loop, because NATO countries will not be able to train thousands of operators; he expects future war to be a battle of material, machines against machines, in which it will be unethical to send people onto a battlefield where they will not survive, while robots will be needed on the ground to retake and hold territory.⁠[8][8][8]

He explained that almost the whole front line is GPS-jammed and that the video signal back from a drone is usually jammed as well, which is why FPV drones are now connected by fiber-optic cable while larger drones navigate autonomously with AI, detect targets and engage them once allowed to; these algorithms, he said, are now very robust and work in daylight, at night, in snow and over terrain deformed by shelling.⁠[8][8][8]

On the moral question, he said that the underlying goal must be to minimize the lives lost, ideally to zero, that the way to do so is to have no conflict at all, and that deterrence is therefore essential; Helsing, he said, was set up to deter and never to have its systems deployed at scale in Ukraine, but will do so because it has to.⁠[8][8]

Whether a machine may make a decision over life and death if it is more accurate than a human is, he said, a legitimate question for society, with no easy answer because people hold different values.⁠[8]

Of critics who say that war is always bad, he said that the objections often come from well-meaning people, whom the company does not dislike but with whom it disagrees: both want peace, and in his view it is achieved by not letting a war happen and not being an inviting target.⁠[8][8]

German society, he said, is pacifist and has over the past couple of years been facing the reality that conflict has not ended and is coming closer; Helsing is set up as a European company, with big offices in London, Paris and elsewhere and its biggest in Munich.⁠[8][8]

Germany, he said, now has what he would call one of the most thriving new defence ecosystems in the world and probably the defence budget that is growing most in absolute terms: by his account it was going from €52 billion in the previous year to an originally planned €153 billion in 2029, a figure since raised to more than €180 billion; because there will most likely not be more soldiers, he expects most of the money to go on new equipment.⁠[8][8][9]

Asked how he felt on learning that the company’s products were being used in Ukraine for the first time, he said that he found it very difficult: the company became more serious and lost some of its light-heartedness; a games company or a software company can be light-hearted, he said, but taking part in what is fundamentally a sad thing is different, and while the company still wants to build the best systems and is very ambitious, it does not take this lightly.⁠[8][8][8]

He believes that part of any population wants conflict and a larger sphere of influence, partly for cultural reasons and partly because it is hardwired; for that not to dominate, the rest of the population has to be protected well enough to make it too expensive to take things by force.⁠[8][8][8]

Realtid’s article of March 2025 quotes him as saying that future battlefields will hold very few people of flesh and blood and that war will essentially be a battle between machines; he acknowledged that this sounds dystopian but saw a positive side in people not being sent out to war.⁠[21]

He observed that progress in AI now comes faster than expected: ten years ago a breakthrough was always said to be five years away and usually took seven to ten, whereas now something thought to be five years away usually arrives in two.⁠[8][8]

He holds that Europe lacks breakout companies not because of regulation, bureaucracy or funding but for want of strategic ambition and aggression; his theory is that founders retire after a sale so often in Europe partly because it is such a nice continent to retire in, where one can buy a house in Tuscany and fly there from Scandinavia in about two hours, and that once a few friends do so it becomes socially accepted; it should not, he said, be socially acceptable for a founder who has been successful simply to retire, though he conceded that this is easy for him to say, having sold his previous company. The certification, export law and confidentiality rules to which his company is subject, he said, amount to a hundred times the bureaucracy a start-up normally faces, and still do not slow it down; he is very optimistic, he said, because a few very aggressive companies would be enough to change things quickly.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8][9]

His TechCrunch author biography states that he has also spoken at TED Global, Google Zeitgeist and Apple’s iPhone 5 keynote, and that he is a member of the Munich Security Conference Innovation Board.⁠[20]

The Engadget note of 2013 states that he had also been named among Next-Gen’s 25 People in the Games Industry, Develop magazine’s 25 Game Changers and Game Developer Magazine’s Power 50, and that he was due to speak at D.I.C.E. Europe on “The Time To Take Risks Is Now”; the note describes the games industry as presenting the opportunity of a lifetime, with old structures broken up, audiences swelled and the revenues of iOS and Android games companies growing exponentially.⁠[3]

He holds that people underestimate what aggression and ambition do for a company, and that regulation, bureaucracy and a lack of funding are excuses; starting a GmbH in Germany, he notes, takes a couple of days longer and requires a visit to a notary, which is not a problem (21:22).⁠[8][9]

His advice to founders who have sold a company is not to leave the field: the second company may be less successful than the first or may not work at all, but that is a risk worth taking (15:18).⁠[8]

He argues for going all out and not aiming for a middling result: either crash completely or be very successful (15:51).⁠[8]

He advises keeping constant pressure on the recruitment pipeline so that a vacancy can be filled quickly, which makes it easier to move out people who are not a good fit; a manager who keeps such a person for fear of missing a deadline is not doing well enough (55:07).⁠[8]

He holds that culture comes from talent density: bring together really good people who have good chemistry, and the culture forms of itself (1:05:31).⁠[8]

He cautions that however well a system performs in tests and government trials, what counts is that it works in reality and in combat (1:06:38).⁠[8]

He holds that an outsider finds it easier to do things differently: Helsing would have been much harder to build if its founders’ backgrounds had been in defence companies (1:19:54).⁠[8]

He holds that commentary creates no value: either do something about what you dislike or do not talk about it, and as a founder concentrate on building your company (1:22:08).⁠[8]

NaturalMotion: Official website: https://www.naturalmotion.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[45]

Helsing: Official website: https://helsing.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24][9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/torstenreil (opens in a new window).⁠[4][9]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torstenreil/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20][9]