Helsing publicly unveiled Area 9 on June 1, 2026, and launched RX-1, a quadruped robotics research platform designed and manufactured in Europe. The launch puts a ground robotics asset inside a company that has spent the last two years moving from defence AI software into autonomous hardware across aircraft, underwater sensing and space-based reconnaissance.

Area 9 and Antoine Bordes

The Area 9 group was carved out inside Helsing in early 2025 as a moonshot research team, with Sifted reporting 30 dedicated employees in July 2025 and more than 40 planned by the end of that year. Helsing now places the division under Antoine Bordes, its Chief Scientist, and identifies Centaur as Area 9’s debut project.

Bordes gives the launch its internal research context. He joined Helsing in 2023 after senior AI research roles at Meta, where he helped lead FAIR in Europe. His move put a frontier-AI research leader inside a defence company building software for aircraft, drones and other physical systems.

RX-1 and European robotics hardware

The RX-1 platform moves the Area 9 research organization directly into physical ground robotics.

While Helsing has not disclosed specific operational metrics such as payload capacity, endurance, compute, sensors, or unit cost, the confirmed hardware details differentiate the project from a standard software-only autonomy layer. The quadruped is designed and manufactured by Helsing within Europe, a development footprint anchored by custom, in-house designed actuators.

This pivot into physical hardware aligns with Helsing's broader corporate timeline. In January 2026, it was reported that Helsing acquired Keybotic, a Barcelona-based robotics company. Keybotic’s primary product was Keyper, an autonomous robot dog engineered for heavy industrial inspections. The startup's prior product work focused entirely on autonomous facility patrols, gas leak detection, and 3D mapping in complex industrial environments.

The reported acquisition gave Helsing a plausible ground-robotics hardware baseline ahead of the launch, without confirming Keybotic’s exact engineering role in RX-1.

ETH Zurich, Marco Hutter and INRIA Paris

The inclusion of ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab, led by Marco Hutter, gives RX-1 its strongest technical validation path. Hutter’s lab is one of Europe’s most important legged-robotics groups, with work spanning the ANYmal quadruped and Team CERBERUS, the winner of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. That partnership places RX-1 in rough-terrain mobility and unmapped-environment research before any disclosed military customer or procurement order.

INRIA Paris is the second initial academic partner. While Helsing has not named a specific principal investigator at the French institute, the institutional selection keeps the first public RX-1 deployments inside European research labs. The first public RX-1 users are European AI and autonomous-systems research labs, not military customers, procurement offices, or disclosed field units.

Funding and physical-domain expansion

Helsing’s capital base gives the robotics move more weight. The company raised a €600 million Series D in June 2025 led by Prima Materia, with participation from Lightspeed, Accel, Plural, General Catalyst, Saab and BDT & MSD Partners. TechCrunch later reported that Helsing was close to a $1.2 billion round at an $18 billion valuation led by Dragoneer and co-led by Lightspeed, though that financing had not been confirmed by Helsing at the time of this draft.

Helsing has also been adding physical-domain projects around the same European sovereignty theme. The company agreed to acquire Grob Aircraft in June 2025 to combine Grob’s composite aircraft manufacturing base with Helsing’s AI and software work. In May 2026, Helsing and OHB established KIRK, a joint venture for tactical space-based reconnaissance systems.

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