Gundbert Scherf, Torsten Reil and Niklas Kohler's Helsing asked current and former staff in May 2026 to switch out of an employee stock option plan as the European defense-AI company works toward its largest financing yet, Bloomberg Technology reported Thursday.
The change, according to Bloomberg, would move employees from an ESOP into a program without direct equity. Bloomberg attributed the account to people familiar with the private discussions and reported that several staff contacted lawyers for advice on opposing the policy. The funding round has not been announced as closed, and the final structure of the replacement staff plan remains undisclosed.
That makes the timing the story. Helsing has spent five years selling a founder-led version of European defense technology: Scherf brought McKinsey aerospace-and-defense work and German defense ministry experience; Reil brought repeat-founder credentials from NaturalMotion, the Oxford spinout Zynga bought for $527 million; Kohler runs product as Helsing pushes from software into drones, aircraft and underwater systems. A staff equity rewrite on the way into a late-stage round tests the internal bargain behind that pitch.
A valuation run meets the employee cap table
Helsing has raised large rounds before. In June 2025, the company announced a EUR 600 million Series D led by Prima Materia, the investment firm of Spotify founder Daniel Ek, with Lightspeed Ventures, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst, Saab and BDT & MSD Partners participating. Helsing said at the time that the Series D followed a EUR 450 million Series C in July 2024 backed by General Catalyst, Elad Gil, Accel, Saab, Lightspeed, Plural and Greenoaks.
The new round under discussion would be larger. A Reuters item carried by Fidelity in May reported, citing the Financial Times, that Helsing was set to raise about $1.2 billion at a valuation of about $18 billion, with Dragoneer leading and Lightspeed acting as co-lead. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report. Bloomberg's new story goes no further than saying Helsing is finalizing its biggest round to date.
The distinction matters because the staff-stock question is tied to a financing that still sits in reported, rather than formally announced, territory. If the $18 billion figure holds, Helsing would sit among the most valuable private defense-technology companies in the West. If the final number changes, the economic value of any employee plan tied to that round changes with it.
For current and former employees, the legal difference between an ESOP and a program without direct equity is central. Options give employees a claim on shares under specific vesting, exercise and tax rules. A replacement program can preserve some economic upside, but the details decide whether staff receive equity-like exposure, a cash bonus formula, a phantom-share arrangement or something narrower. Bloomberg's report does not establish the replacement mechanics, which means the cleanest factual reading is also the most uncomfortable one for Helsing: staff were asked to accept a material change before knowing, publicly, how the next funding round will settle.
The founders built Helsing for a harder kind of startup cycle
Helsing's founders have never been building a routine enterprise-software company. On its company page, Helsing says it was founded to protect democratic values and open societies, and argues that defense has become a software problem. The page lists Scherf and Reil as co-CEOs, Kohler as president and chief product officer, and Daniel Ek and former Airbus CEO Tom Enders as co-chairmen.
Scherf's biography is unusually well matched to the market Helsing is trying to win. The Warsaw Security Forum says he was a McKinsey partner responsible for aerospace and defense and technology, and from 2014 to 2016 served as Special Representative for Digital Development and Armaments at Germany's Federal Ministry of Defence. Reil's background is different: The Guardian's speaker profile lists him as an Oxford-trained biologist who spun NaturalMotion out of Oxford's zoology department after PhD work on complex systems.
That mix explains Helsing's speed. The company started with defense AI software, then moved deeper into hardware as Ukraine showed that cheap, resilient, software-steered systems could change procurement priorities faster than legacy contractors could move. Helsing unveiled HX-2 in December 2024 as an electrically propelled x-wing precision munition with up to 100 km of range, onboard AI, electronic-warfare resistance and swarm operation through its Altra software, with human operators in control.
By February 13th, 2025, Helsing said it was producing 6,000 additional HX-2 strike drones for Ukraine after a previous order of 4,000 HF-1 drones. In the same announcement, Helsing said its first Resilience Factory in southern Germany had an initial monthly capacity of more than 1,000 HX-2 units.
That move from code into manufacturing changes the economics around founder control, investor protections and employee equity. Factories, aircraft certification, defense procurement and supply chains consume capital differently from a cloud-software product. Helsing also signed a binding agreement in June 2025 to acquire Grob Aircraft, citing Grob's composite aircraft manufacturing and its own airfield as assets for Helsing's air-domain work. Commercial terms were kept confidential.
Defense-tech money is getting bigger, and less simple
Helsing is raising in a market where private defense companies are being funded as future primes. Germany's Quantum Systems announced on July 2nd, 2026 that it had signed a $1.2 billion Series D at an approximately $8 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus and Advent. Shield AI said in June 2026 it would acquire Aechelon and raise $2 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Those rounds put pressure on cap tables. Late-stage investors in capital-intensive defense companies often want cleaner structures, clearer employee-incentive pools and more predictable dilution before writing billion-dollar checks. Employees who joined early, especially in a company selling mission and national-security urgency, read the same paperwork through a different lens: equity is the compensation for accepting startup risk inside a sector where the buyer is government, sales cycles are slow and public scrutiny is high.
Helsing's own product road map makes that tension sharper. On June 10th, 2026, the company introduced CA-1 Electronic Attack, an autonomous aircraft for electronic warfare. Helsing said the CA-1 platform is in development, with maiden flights for the attack version planned for early 2027, initial operating capability targeted for 2029 for the kinetic-attack version and 2031 for the electronic-attack version. That is a long execution window for employees whose equity economics may have just been renegotiated.
Helsing's founders have earned investor attention by matching a European sovereignty thesis with products built for the Ukraine-era battlefield. The stock-plan dispute shows the cost of becoming the company investors now want to fund. Helsing is being financed less like an AI lab and more like a defense industrial company. Employees are asking whether the upside they were promised still maps to the company being built.