EBM WEEKEND Read-Nick Staunton
On Monday, a five-year-old company most Spotify users have never heard of raised $1.8bn. Helsing, a Munich firm that builds artificial intelligence for strike drones and fighter jets, closed the round at an $18bn valuation. That makes it the most valuable startup in mainland Europe, trailing only Revolut among the continent’s private tech giants. Investor demand, the company said, ran well past the money on offer.
The man who set Helsing on that path is the same man who spent two decades persuading the world that recorded music should cost nothing to stream. Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, is Helsing’s chairman and, through his investment firm Prima Materia, its most important early backer. The founder of the platform that pays songwriters fractions of a cent per play is now the face of European weapons capital. It is one of the strangest second acts in business, and it tells you something uncomfortable about what winning looks like in Europe right now.
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SubscribeThe winner Europe kept asking for
For twenty years the European business conversation has circled the same complaint. The continent has the science, the engineers and the savings, yet it exports its best founders to California and imports the finished product back at a markup. Where, the lament goes, is Europe’s answer to the American technology giant?
Ek is one of the few honest answers. Spotify was founded in Stockholm in 2006 as a response to piracy, and it did something European companies almost never manage. It beat the Americans at a global consumer platform and kept the headquarters at home. Spotify now turns over billions a quarter and remains the default way most of the planet listens to music. On the short list of European technology champions that actually won, alongside the fintech names that now dominate the continent’s scale-up rankings, Ek’s company sits near the top.
From playlists to loitering munitions
Prima Materia, the fund Ek runs with early Spotify investor Shakil Khan, was set up in 2021 with a pitch about backing ambitious European companies for the long term. One of its first bets was Helsing, then a small German software startup writing code to help militaries make sense of battlefield data. The initial cheque was about €100m, and even that drew complaints.
What has happened since is a masterclass in timing, whatever you make of the morality. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine turned European defence from a political embarrassment into one of the continent’s fastest-growing industrial sectors. Helsing rode the wave and then reshaped itself to catch more of it. It stopped being a pure software house and started building hardware: the HX-2 loitering munition, autonomous underwater vessels, and the CA-1 Europa, an uncrewed combat aircraft designed to fly alongside piloted fighters. In January it bought a Spanish robot-dog maker. It runs what it calls “Resilience Factories,” the first capable of turning out a thousand drones a month.
The funding tracked the ambition. A €450m round in 2024 valued Helsing near €5bn. In June 2025, Ek personally led a €600m round that pushed the figure to roughly $14bn and made him chairman. He told the Financial Times he was “doubling down.” This week’s $1.8bn takes it to $18bn. For scale, the American equivalent, Anduril, raised at $61bn in May, so investors are pricing European defence AI at roughly a third of its US cousin, and closing. Defence now swallows a growing share of Europe’s venture funding, a category that barely registered five years ago.
Helsing’s systems are not theoretical. Its drones are in Ukraine, the clearest proof of concept a defence startup could ask for, and the sharpest reminder of who actually profits when Europe funds a war. Performance reports have been mixed. Politico cited a German briefing suggesting the HX-2 hit its target five times in fourteen attempts in the Donbas; Helsing countered that it was operating against intense Russian jamming and had destroyed a tank and howitzers. Either way, the company is now embedded in the procurement plans of several European governments, with a German framework contract that could run past €1bn.
The artists revolt
None of this has gone down well with the people whose work underwrites Ek’s fortune.
The backlash began in earnest in mid-2025, when the €600m round made the news. The San Francisco band Deerhoof pulled its catalogue with a line that became the movement’s slogan: “We don’t want our music killing people.” The Australian psych-rock act King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, comfortably the biggest name to leave, followed and told fans to lean on the industry’s tech bosses. Xiu Xiu, Hotline TNT and a string of independent labels joined. In September, the trip-hop group Massive Attack became the first major-label act to go, framing the decision as a moral burden layered on top of an economic one.
That economic grievance is the fuel. Spotify pays somewhere around three to five cents per ten streams, a rate musicians have resented for years, and the platform has spent recent months piling on other irritations: AI-generated tracks, “ghost artist” playlists that route royalties away from real performers, and, in the United States, advertising for the immigration enforcement agency ICE. When artists learned that the algorithm sorting their songs also enriches the chairman of a weapons company, the exodus found its narrative.
It is worth being precise, because parts of the boycott were not. Some musicians and fans linked Helsing’s technology to the war in Gaza; there is no evidence for that, and the confusion was later debunked. Helsing sells to European democracies and its hardware is fighting in Ukraine, not the Middle East. The strongest version of the artists’ case does not need the embellishment. It is simply this: they did not sign up for their creative labour to become seed capital for autonomous weapons, and they were never asked.
Ek, for his part, stepped back from day-to-day Spotify in January, moving to executive chairman while two long-time deputies took the chief executive roles. The distance is convenient but not total. He remains Spotify’s controlling shareholder and its public face, and the wealth funding Helsing was built on the platform’s back.
The uncomfortable logic
Here is where it gets harder to be glib, because Ek’s argument is not stupid.
His case runs roughly as follows. Europe spent thirty years disarming while the world grew more dangerous. It now faces a land war on its own continent, an unreliable American security guarantee, and a technological gap in exactly the systems, AI, drones, autonomy, that will decide future conflicts. Building that capability at home is not warmongering; it is the precondition for Europe’s technological sovereignty, the same sovereignty everyone claims to want when the subject is chips or cloud rather than missiles. Someone has to fund it, and European capital has been notoriously unwilling to.
The market agrees with him emphatically. JPMorgan has put more than a trillion dollars of ambition behind European rearmament and reshoring. Defence has gone from untouchable to the most crowded trade on the continent. And that is precisely the risk Ek’s cheerleaders should sit with. When a theme gets this popular this fast, prices tend to run ahead of reality. Europe’s listed defence rally has already stalled and partly reversed this year, with Rheinmetall well off its peak, even as the initial public offerings keep coming. An $18bn private valuation for a company whose flagship drone has a contested hit rate is a bet on a future that is assumed rather than proven.
So there are really two questions tangled together, and they deserve to be kept apart. The moral one is whether an artist’s work should fund weapons without consent, and the honest answer is that reasonable people land in different places. The commercial one is whether Ek is early and right, or simply riding a bubble that a peace, a scandal or a budget squeeze could deflate. On that, the jury is out, and the crowd piling in behind him is not evidence that he is correct. It is only evidence that he is fashionable.
The verdict
What makes the Ek story matter beyond Spotify is that it collapses two European anxieties into one man. The continent has spent years wishing for founders bold enough to build champions and back its strategic autonomy instead of selling out to Silicon Valley. Ek did both. He also demonstrated that those wishes have an edge to them. A founder willing to take real risks on Europe’s behalf will sometimes take risks that a good chunk of the public finds abhorrent.
You do not have to resolve the ethics to see the significance. Daniel Ek is the closest thing Europe has to a home-grown technology hero, and he has chosen to spend his second act, and a large part of his fortune, arming the continent. That is either visionary or grotesque depending on where you stand, and quite possibly both at once. What it is not is boring, or American, or safe. For a European tech scene that spent decades being all three, that alone is worth noticing, even as the artists walk out the door.
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