Helsing unveils Clarity, a German AI military platform to rival Palantir's Maven

What Clarity does

Helsing, a Munich-based defence start-up known for its strike drones, presented Clarity on Wednesday, 11 November, as a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help military units process field data faster. The software collects and analyses floods of information from drones, satellites, sensors, written reports and publicly available sources, and according to reports a human still makes the final decisions. The company says Clarity identifies military forces, installations and positions, and prepares results so that targets can be paired with a suitable weapons system. Scherf said the battlefield problem is no longer a lack of information but an excess of it, and that success increasingly depends on how effectively forces turn information into action. He pointed to the war in Ukraine, where soldiers and commanders are often overwhelmed by the volume of information, leading to wrong or delayed decisions.

“With Clarity, European armed forces receive software that is developed in Europe, runs on their own infrastructure and remains under their control.”

Palantir and the sovereignty argument

Palantir's Maven Smart System has become central to the US military and, according to Die Welt, was acquired by NATO last year. The Financial Times reports that a growing list of European nations has shunned Maven amid mistrust of Palantir and strain in transatlantic relations. Die Welt reports that Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, whose police work with Palantir programmes, have called for European alternatives over time, while Palantir describes its own platforms as powerful, secure and sovereign. Threats by US President Donald Trump to leave NATO have raised fears in Europe of dependence on the United States and on Palantir, according to WirtschaftsWoche. Handelsblatt reports that the Bundeswehr excluded Maven for sovereignty reasons. Scherf told the Financial Times that European nations need homegrown capability in order to re-arm after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“But ultimately, if you don't have a sovereign capability in intelligence, targeting and [selecting weapons], then you really aren't credibly deterring.”

Bundeswehr trials and rival bidders

Spiegel, as cited by WirtschaftsWoche, reports that the platform is already being tested at the Bundeswehr. A senior German military official told the Financial Times that Helsing and Berlin-based Orcrist are among three or four European tech companies set to receive an initial contract to trial their systems with the armed forces in the coming weeks. Handelsblatt reports that the Bundeswehr is also in contact with Almato from Stuttgart, a subsidiary of IT provider Datagroup, as well as Orcrist and Chapsvision from Paris. Thomas Daum, vice admiral and inspector of the Bundeswehr's cyber and information domain, told Handelsblatt in September 2026 that market research was under way and that he was optimistic about a prototype in the second quarter of 2027. The Handelsblatt headline says the Bundeswehr wants to present a prototype in early summer.

Company background and the source code deal

Helsing is financed privately through private investors and large funding rounds, and its founders say no stock market listing is currently planned. The Financial Times puts the company's valuation at $18bn in its latest funding round earlier this year, making it Europe's most valuable defence tech start-up. Helsing is best known for its HX-2 strike drone, but Scherf said Clarity had been 'completely at the heart' of the company's work since its founding in 2021. He said the firm spent a 'nine-digit sum' and 'hundreds of engineer years' developing the platform largely in secret. Handelsblatt reports that in the latest order Helsing handed the Bundeswehr the source code for the operating system of a new fighter aircraft system.

What comes next

A senior military official expects the trials to begin in the coming weeks, while Daum's timetable points to a prototype by the second quarter of 2027. Frank Sauer, head of research at the Bundeswehr university, said Clarity must meet the ministry's AI guidelines on robustness, reliability, transparency and traceability, and that on paper it does. Sauer added that the ministry pushes for modular, open architectures, because otherwise buyers end up trapped in proprietary systems and dependent on a single vendor. Handelsblatt reports that Clarity follows so-called Mosa principles, which make applications both integrable and exchangeable so that dependencies can be avoided. Helsing states that data, models and operations remain under the sole control of the customer.