It is a glorious, crisp day as I walk through the Hofgarten in the centre of Munich on my way to lunch. The Bavarian capital has sometimes been described as Italy’s most northerly city and its elegant gardens mimic the Italian Renaissance style. As residents stroll through the Hofgarten’s alleyways, it is hard to imagine a more opulent reflection of la dolce vita.
It is therefore jarring to interview Torsten Reil, one of Germany’s most successful entrepreneurs, who nowadays spends his time thinking mostly about war. The best way to prevent another conflict from devastating his country, he argues, is to rebuild Europe’s hard power to deter a revanchist Russia. His defence tech company Helsing — motto: “Artificial intelligence to protect our democracies” — is committed to delivering 6,000 HX-2 strike drones to Ukraine. It has also just opened its first Resilience Factory in southern Germany with an initial production capacity of more than 1,000 AI-enabled drones a month, and has plans to open more.
Reil says that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the newly assertive nationalism of President Donald Trump’s administration in the US have finally shaken Europe awake. “Sadly, it is currently rational to be pessimistic. Bad things are happening faster than we expect them to happen,” he adds. “We can’t be naive about what’s happening. We have to be prepared. And the number-one thing that we can do to protect our democracies is to deter.”
Reil has chosen to meet at the Trattoria Seitz, an unassuming Italian restaurant in a residential district of Munich. Inside, the place is buzzing with multilingual talk of shopping trips and business deals as I am ushered to a narrow table by a window shaded by red awnings. As I wait, I think about three interrelated forces likely to shape the fate of Europe this decade: geopolitics, AI and the revitalisation (or not) of the economy. Reil stands at the centre of all three intersecting circles in that Venn diagram.
My guest is dressed in regulation entrepreneur’s uniform: trainers, jeans, black T-shirt and zipped sweater. His black beard is flecked with grey. The 51-year-old Reil’s life has been notable for some jagged switches of direction, so I ask how he has ended up doing what he does today.
In flawless English, he says that the first of his life’s main interests was sparked when serving as a 19-year-old military conscript in Oldenburg, the northern German city where he was born, and reading biology books in the barracks in his spare time. In particular, he was enthralled by The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. He saw on the books’ flyleaves that Dawkins taught at Oxford university. “So, I very naively applied to Oxford, but I didn’t do biology at school and all I knew was literally from those books.”
Astonished to win a place, Reil spent an “amazing” three years as an undergraduate — even if he was never taught by Dawkins and initially found it tough to write essays on meiosis and mitosis in a foreign language. “I fell in love with evolutionary biology, less so dissecting animals,” he says. That love led him to start — but never finish — a doctorate in the complexity of biological systems. He put his alternative aspirations to be a professional guitar player on hold.
At this point, our starters arrive. Reil has gone for a simple tomato and onion salad. I have opted for a vegetable-packed minestrone soup. I clumsily dangle a corner of my napkin in the soup and inadvertently smear it on my shirt. Quick as a flash, a waiter whisks away the messy napkin and discreetly hands me a clean one.
As part of his research, Reil bought himself an Atari ST computer and learnt to program. Inspired by Dawkins’ writings, he wrote some evolutionary algorithms to reproduce biological evolution in a computer algorithm. Using this technique, he was able to generate two- and four-legged digital creatures that walked. “It worked really quite well. That was basically the core research for my doctorate but also became the basis for NaturalMotion, the company I spun out.”
At NaturalMotion, founded in 2001, Reil realised that these 3D simulations were ideal for creating interactive computer animations. He naively thought that computer games players could interact with these animations just like real life, until he learnt that games platforms were not fast enough to run the software. “Naive enthusiasm has been a bit of a recurring theme of my life,” he jokes.
Undeterred, he found that his animations were perfectly suited for cinematic visual effects and they were used in several blockbuster films, including the battle scenes in some of the films in the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Spider-Man series. Eventually, with the launch of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games consoles in the mid-2000s, the technology became powerful enough to run NaturalMotion’s simulations. Reil then began licensing his services to games companies, which used his animations in Red Dead Redemption and some of the Star Wars and Grand Theft Auto games.
New opportunities emerged with the launch of the iPhone, and NaturalMotion started developing its own games, including CSR Racing. “It’s still to this day, to my knowledge, the biggest racing game.”
The company’s rapid growth drew the attention of the US video games company Zynga, which bought NaturalMotion for $527mn in 2014. Aged 40, Reil suddenly became a very rich man with more than $50mn in the bank. However, he stayed with NaturalMotion for another three years to ensure the smooth integration of the two companies. “I really wanted to make sure that the games were successful, that the integration worked, that everyone was happy.”
Menu
Trattoria Seitz
Seitzstraße 12, 80539 Munich
Tomato and onion salad €9.50
Minestrone soup €8.50
Beef carpaccio €18.90
Saltimbocca alla Romana €32.50
Bottle Pellegrino €7.50
Coffee x2 €6
Total inc tax and service €82.90 (£69.50)
When he left, he said he felt a great sense of accomplishment but also utter exhaustion. After being so busy for so long, he suddenly found that he had nothing to do and spent his first few days descaling his kitchen appliances.
Once he had recharged his batteries, he began thinking about what to do next and started investing in deep-tech start-ups across Europe. “I’m a passionate European. I believe in European ideas. I believe we all have a shared history, a shared culture,” he says.
Spending time with other founders, he understood that with more experience he could have run NaturalMotion so much better. One of Silicon Valley’s biggest advantages, not yet matched in Europe in his view, is that it has so many tight networks of founders who learn from each other about how to build companies quickly — as well as many repeat entrepreneurs.
With hindsight, Reil says, he would have spent far more time on hiring and performance management, making the human side of the business his top priority. Like many start-ups, NaturalMotion grew too quickly, he says, and hired too many people. How do you build teams? How do you have honest conversations with employees who underperform? How do you manage out those who do not fit? “I think we did OK with NaturalMotion, but it was a little bit haphazard,” he says. “It’s quite humbling, when you look back and realise how many things you got wrong.”
As he considered starting another business, he thought the biggest opportunities would lie in two emerging trends, geopolitical and technological. First, Reil was becoming concerned about the security threat to Europe and understood the urgent need to re-arm — particularly as the US grew more distant during Trump’s first presidential term. Second, he increasingly realised that Europe’s defence industry had a “software problem”. Defence contractors and politicians were still obsessed with building hardware — such as tanks, warplanes and battleships — without fully understanding how technology would transform the battlefield. Defence tech software companies such as Palantir had begun to emerge in the US. “But Europe had nothing. And I felt that was a massive vulnerability,” he says.
To rectify that problem, Reil teamed up with Gundbert Scherf, a former German defence ministry official and McKinsey partner, and Niklas Köhler, an AI researcher and entrepreneur, to found the Munich-based defence tech company Helsing in 2021. Its original goal was to create an AI-enabled intelligence platform to synthesise and analyse battlefield data and improve the speed and quality of military decision making. “We started a defence company with a feeling of ‘If we don’t do this, then no one else will,’” he says.
At that time, most European venture capital investors steered clear of the defence sector. Environmental, social and governance rules prevented many investment funds from backing businesses that help kill people. However, Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify who has set up his own investment company, Prima Materia, saw the strategic need and the business opportunity and in 2021 invested €100mn into Helsing. His investment caused a backlash among Spotify users, with some artists demanding a boycott of his music streaming service.
Public sentiment changed radically following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, especially in Germany. Helsing, which has been actively supporting Ukraine for the past three years, has expanded rapidly and opened offices in London and Paris. Reil says it has become far easier to hire talented engineers who share the company’s mission. Investors have also warmed to the sector, enabling Helsing to raise an additional €450mn last year at a near €5bn valuation.
Even so, Reil criticises the herd mentality of VC investors, who are belatedly rushing into the defence sector. “Initially, everyone was against it, now everyone is for it. There is a lot of unsophisticated money going into defence start-ups that will never be successful.” He questions whether many VC investors are going to earn a return on their money, given that the big public defence companies are never going to pay enough to buy their start-ups and cash them out. He says Helsing’s three co-founders have vowed not to sell their business and are instead aiming for it to become an independent listed company instead.
The restaurant is now at peak capacity and it is becoming harder to hear each other over the din. Reil tucks into his beef carpaccio, laced with rocket, while I tackle a saltimbocca alla Romana. The flavourful food contrasts with the increasingly dark tenor of our conversation as I ask Reil about the future of warfare.
In the antiseptic language of his newfound trade, Reil argues that the battlefield will increasingly be dominated by “precise autonomous mass”. In other words, swarms of AI-guided drones capable of delivering lethal payloads will make battlefields no-go zones for flesh-and-blood soldiers. Warfare will evolve into a battle of machines against machines, whether on land, sea or air.
For example, Helsing’s latest HX-2 drones could have knocked out the column of Russian tanks that headed towards Kyiv in 2022. Submersible drones will also be able to patrol and protect critical underwater internet cables. And Helsing claims that its AI fighter pilots, currently in development, are outperforming human pilots in simulated dogfights. “It’s a battle of materiel, basically,” Reil says. “That sounds dystopian, but it does have a positive side, which is that you’re not sending humans into war.”
Human rights campaigners warn of the terrifying dangers of killer robots that could strip humans of agency and attack targets without approval. In that kind of war, authoritarian governments, with fewer qualms than democracies, might gain an advantage.
But Reil says that Helsing will not go down that path because of its commitment to democratic values. The company runs ethics workshops with its employees to work out the most meaningful ways of keeping “humans in the loop” when it comes to life-and-death decisions. That means drone operators need to receive just the right amount of information so that they can process it properly. “They feel challenged. They get into a positive flow and they contribute to the decision making,” he says. But if they are overwhelmed — or underwhelmed — with information, they will probably become overagitated, or bored, and accept an automated recommendation.
Helsing also insists it will only sell its technology to democratic governments. But what happens, I ask, if the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which won the second-highest share of votes in the recent parliamentary elections with 21 per cent, comes to power? Could Helsing really refuse to sell its drones to the legally constituted government in its own country? Reil is convinced that AfD is not going to win power in Germany. But if ever it did, he concedes, it would be a “real problem”.
Like everyone else, Reil finds it difficult to read Trump’s tactics when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, and does not know how the war will end. “There’s a degree of unpredictability there which may be calculated or may not be,” he says. The Pentagon is also investing heavily in drone technology, even if overall military spending is coming under fire from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In August, Anduril Industries, a California-based defence tech start-up, raised $1.5bn at a $14bn valuation to build a giant drone factory known as Arsenal-1 in Ohio.
Over coffee, Reil spells out a more optimistic vision for Europe. The Trump administration had legitimate complaints against Europe for failing to spend enough on defence, but the region has finally woken up and responded, he says. Europe’s leaders now understand the urgency of asserting technological sovereignty, meaning there will be stronger backing for other critical tech industries, such as AI, semiconductors, energy and nuclear fusion. Helsing is itself now partnering with the French AI company Mistral to deepen European co-operation.
Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, Reil anticipates a surge in defence spending across Europe, especially in Germany. The country’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to defend European peace and security. With its deep pool of talented engineers and world-class manufacturing expertise, Europe, Reil predicts, might even lead the defence tech revolution. “I’m genuinely optimistic,” he says.
Given his success in entertaining millions of users at NaturalMotion, I am curious why he launched a company to develop deadly products that — with luck — will never be used by anyone. He replies that he was motivated by Helsing’s mission to defend democracy — and is also energised by the business opportunity. “Helsing is the most fulfilling thing I could ever think of doing,” he says. “I genuinely find it a privilege to do it and we were lucky that the timing was right.”
Reil is the first to acknowledge the moral agonies of developing lethal military drones. But he remains convinced that democracies sometimes have to be ready to fight to preserve their values. As the old Roman saying goes: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
John Thornhill is the FT’s innovation editor
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