Torsten Reil, Helsing Founder: Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | E1237

When we started Helsing in March 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China. There is a big wave coming towards us, and it's, it is autonomy and software in defense, and it's unstoppable. The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense as happened to the car industry.

Where are we in three years with Russia-Ukraine? What happens in China and Taiwan?

Again, I think it's plausible that there will be a-

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Thorsten, I've wanted to do this for a long time. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Very good to see you. Thanks for having me.

Now, I wanna start, uh, with lessons from NaturalMotion actually. So over a 15-year period, you built the company before selling to Zynga, and I just wanted to start with, what did you do the first time that worked and you took with you to Helsing?

It, it was a long journey. Um, NaturalMotion started as a spin-out, uh, out of university, o- out of Oxford, and we were trying to create physically simulated creatures controlled by neural networks, which was a crazy idea at the time. This was a time, I think, of the Pentium processor or something. Um, so it was, it's hard to do computationally, but it worked quite well, and we ended up, um, using it in and, and licensing it for visual effects in big Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, then for big video games like GTA IV, GTA V, uh, Max Payne, um, and many others. And that worked quite well, um, but it only worked, I would say, okay, in terms of, in terms of revenues. You know, as a, as a founder, you, you wanna get to a hockey stick, um, movement eventually, and, and that wasn't the case with the technology business. It was growing, but it was growing reasonably slowly. And I think one of the things that we did do well was that we, we recognized that growth wasn't as strong as, as we wanted to, and we, we took a big, um, took a big risk and pivoted the company to doing games ourselves. Um, so you know how people say, "Focus, focus, focus." Wi- we did focus, um, but only up to a point. Uh, at one point, we said, "This isn't working the way we want it to, so let's pivot to actually making games ourselves." And we, we were very naive about how easy it was going to be. Um, we, we watched Rockstar work, and we were big fans of, of Rockstar Games, and we thought, "Well, we should give it a go as well," and ended up making games for iPhone, which, um, which worked out very well. We got a, a lot of support from Apple, um, ended up creating CSR Racing, which was one of the, uh, largest iPhone games, uh, at the time. And at that point, the company did take off, and this kind of approach to risk-taking and going all in, um, uh, stayed with me and I think stayed with, with Helsing now. We, we are big believers of focus, um, just doing very few things, um, and when things don't work, we try to adapt very quickly.