A recent war game in Europe run by former Pentagon officials and U.S. military officers, reported by The Times of London on May 31, found that a Russian invasion of Lithuania would leave NATO in an existential crisis. Then they reran the scenario, this time equipping the defending German and Lithuanian forces with 12,000 HX-2 drones made by the European AI company Helsing. “In the iteration of the Lithuania war game where the Russians were facing NATO forces armed with sizeable numbers of the drones, they buckled,” reported The Times.
The kicker is that the war game was funded by Helsing—though supposedly run independently of the company—which hopes that Britain and other allies will follow Germany and Ukraine in buying substantial quantities of its HX-2 drones. In other words, Helsing funded the war game as part of its strategy for marketing its drones.
Helsing was founded in Munich in 2021, originally as an artificial intelligence software company. Swedish billionaire Daniel Ek, the founder of music distribution service Spotify, provided €100 million in initial funding, led the raising of another €650 million for the company in 2025, and is Helsing’s chairman.
