DSEI 2025 — German defense AI startup Helsing and Danish software specialist Systematic have entered into a partnership aimed at delivering advanced reconnaissance strike capabilities to Europe by leveraging AI-powered swarm capabilities in combination with supporting command and control systems.
Central to the move is a push to provide customers on the continent with “the capability and capacity required for quicker decisions, state-of-the-art targeting, and precision mass strike capabilities,” said Helsing in a company statement Wednesday.
The collaboration is built around Helsing’s Altra recon strike software platform and Systematic’s SitaWare C4ISR suite, to allow customers “to be instantly ‘drone ready’ and open the pathway to further scale the deployment of autonomous sensors and effectors as drone swarms,” added Helsing.
“Customers and allies” have consistently talked to Helsing about how they can potentially add autonomy to reconnaissance strikes and create “joint situational awareness” based on lessons learned from the Ukraine war, Helsing CEO Gundbert Scherf, told Breaking Defense here at the DSEI trade show in London.
This is a “statement” to say “we can do this from Europe, for Europe, in a European way,” he added.
Systematic CEO Nikolaj Bramsen said that the partnership with Helsing made “perfect sense” for both companies “being driven by European values” while providing customers across the region with “sovereign data.”
The use of AI, as envisioned by the new industrial partnership, opens the way for data exchange between drones to be accelerated, including platforms like Helsing’s HX-2 strike aircraft, which is already deployed in Ukraine, per the company’s statement.
The addition of SitaWare to this concept lets users quickly take up key tasks like compiling “target lists, creating plans and orders, tasking strike assets, deconflicting airspace to ensure safe operations, and delivering fused friendly and enemy force pictures,” Helsing’s statement also explains.
The AI firm and Systematic are already collaborating together for the UK’s Project ASGARD, designed to boost British Army targeting and strike capabilities and are “integrated together in a couple” of other countries, shared Scherf.
“The UK is very progressive in how it thinks about … equipping its Estonian battlegroup with some of the most modern software capabilities” available, he noted.
Helsing’s priorities with the Systematic recon strike offer also include “equipping the eastern flank, because that’s where those different countries, brigades, battle groups and so on will meet, and ideally, will work seamlessly together for a better deterrence posture,” said Scherf.