Founded 3.5 years ago, Helsing is estimated to be worth more than €5 billion. It provides software solutions for defense and security using AI in air, land, and maritime domains.

Co-founder and co-CEO Gundbert Scher said the company wants to "protect democracies." While hardware and ammunition take priority in the military, software plays an increasingly large role.

"We use it to process all of the very rich data that gets produced, fuse that, analyze it, where it is produced, and then give the user, the men and women in uniform, the best situational picture they have so they can make the best decision," Scherf told ERR.

The company already operates in several other European countries, such as France, the UK, and Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion. Scherf said Helsing now wants to move into deterrence which made investing in Estonia "very logical."

"Estonia, obviously, is not only a key country on the eastern flank, it's also a country that has been positioning itself as a leader in technology. It was a very natural conclusion to go there," he explained.

Helsing plans to invest €70 million in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the coming years.

"We're already in touch with the government, and the Ministry of Defense to discuss how our technology can also make a difference for Estonia. One, for its own [defense] forces, but two, also importantly, so that we can actually use the insight from Estonia, a country that obviously has a very clear view of what is required, to drive the thinking in Europe," Scherf said. "Learning from the eastern flank will make the forces better and will also make our products and technology better."

Artificial intelligence could help most with drones and artillery, he explained.

"What Russia has done quite successfully in the last year or so is they've deployed electronic warfare, basically jamming connectivity, making it very hard to use drones as we traditionally have used them to detect objects. Our technology can sit on top of a drone on a chip and can actually then do the detection on the drone," the co-found explained.

This gives several benefits including resilience to jamming and electronic warfare, successfully navigating drones, linking them to artillery, and interoperability, Scherf outlined.

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