In this issue: Helsing—a record raise, a flagship research division and a talent picture that tells a more complicated story.
Helsing is raising like a European champion, and hiring like an American one.
The narrative is sovereign, European, software-first. The talent data points elsewhere.
Helsing is now one of the best-capitalised defence companies in Europe, and its public story is a European one. So why are its most senior open roles being posted in Washington, not Munich—when less than 2% of its talent sit in the US today?
Recent US hires are indicative too towards an American focus—a chief engineer, director of people and talent, and director of business development.
The bigger question however is its tech pivot. Helsing signalled its move into hardware in December 2024 with the HX-2 strike drone and opened its first factory in February 2025—but on talent, it remains the most software-heavy company among its competitors, at roughly 64% software to 36% hardware, against a peer average closer to a 45/55 split.
Almost every hardware engineer it employs was hired in the last 18 months, and the gap is being closed by acquisition and partnership—ARX Robotics, Grob Aircraft, Keybotic, Blue Ocean Marine—rather than organic hiring. With open roles split evenly between software and hardware, we can expect more acqui-hires to grow their hardware focus.
Here's where that leaves Helsing against its peers on Zeki's overall talent scorecard:
Helsing sits mid-pack overall—strong, but behind the two US leaders on the metrics that scale defence businesses.
Helsing built the best engineering bench in European defence tech. Then its best researchers started leaving.
A flagship research division, announced the same season as a run of senior research exits. Look at the timing.
Give Helsing its due: on Zeki's engineering scorecard it ranks first of eight, ahead of Anduril and Shield AI, leading the field on specialism depth, academic tier and PhD density. This is a genuinely elite bench, and its research cadre is unusually dense—around 10% of the workforce sit in dedicated AI research roles, roughly double the US firms.
In June 2026 Helsing doubled down, announcing "Area 9," a dedicated advanced-research division aimed at next-generation robotics and autonomy.
Here's the tension. That announcement lands in the same window as some of the most senior research departures in the company's history—including the single highest-scoring researcher in the entire organisation. And there's a deeper question the data raises: whether Helsing has the specialist bench to deliver on a robotics push, or whether it's announcing a capability it can't yet staff.
Who left, where the gaps are, and how Helsing is trying to fill them—that's in the report.
Lovable is raising at $13.2B. Our data shows it risks losing the talent race.
Lovable, the Swedish vibe-coding startup, is in talks to raise $300 million at a valuation of $13.2 billion—exactly double the $6.6 billion valuation the company achieved last December. Menlo Ventures is expected to lead the round, and the business hit $500 million in annualised revenue run rate in June. On paper, it’s one of Europe's breakout AI stories.
But the fundraising deck and the org chart don't always agree. Zeki's data shows Lovable drawing on increasingly narrow pools of talent and shedding staff—and when a company is scaling this fast, who's leaving matters as much as who's joining.
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