Helsing expands into subsea defense with Blue Ocean acquisition and UK resilience factory.

European defense AI firm Helsing has acquired Blue Ocean, a UK–Australian maker of autonomous underwater vehicles, keeping both nations’ operations active. The move accelerates Europe’s ability to mass-produce AI-driven subsea systems, a growing focus area for NATO and AUKUS allies amid rising undersea threats.

Helsing announced on October 8, 2025, that the European defense AI company moved to acquire Blue Ocean, an Australian and UK-based specialist in autonomous underwater vehicles, folding its hardware and manufacturing teams into Helsing while keeping sites in both countries. The deal, executed via a members’ scheme of arrangement under Australian law, is framed as an accelerant for mass-produced underwater platforms to secure the subsea battlespace, with recent trials at the UK’s BUTEC range underscoring technical momentum and a new resilience factory in Plymouth pointing to scale.
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SG-1 Fathom UUV is a 1.95 m, ~60 kg endurance glider cruising 1–2 knots for up to three months. With Lura acoustic-AI, it classifies targets on the edge and supports patrol, seabed, and swarm modes for ASW and critical infrastructure protection (Picture source: Blue Ocean).

Helsing brings battle-hardened edge AI from its land and air portfolios and is now grafting that software advantage onto Blue Ocean’s AUV design, build, and operations know-how. The company’s stated aim is sovereign, distributed production for allies from the North Atlantic to AUKUS waters, a bet that industrial speed, low unit cost, and autonomous mass will matter more than exquisite but scarce platforms.

Over the past year, Blue Ocean teamed with Helsing on maritime sensors and autonomy, culminating in summer trials at the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre off Scotland, where the partners exercised an AI-enabled glider as part of a broader maritime alliance that has included QinetiQ. The trials, conducted in July and highlighted in September, validated Helsing’s edge processing in real ocean noise and low-bandwidth conditions, a crucial requirement for persistent subsea surveillance.

One co-developed product now sits at the heart of the combined roadmap: the SG-1 Fathom subsurface glider paired with the Lura acoustic-AI suite. SG-1 is compact at 195 cm length, 28 cm diameter, and about 60 kg, cruising quietly at 1 to 2 knots with endurance up to three months. It can patrol in swarms through the water column or sit on the seabed to listen, all while classifying targets on the edge through a large acoustic model trained on decades of data. Lura’s human-in-the-loop control allows a single operator ashore or afloat to manage a constellation, a design choice aimed at both manpower savings and rapid retaskability.

Taken together, the integration promises leaner hardware-software cycles, common modular payloads, and manufacturing scale. Helsing says the Plymouth Resilience Factory, part of a reported 350 million pound UK investment, will mass produce SG-1 and related systems, giving European navies a pathway to field hundreds of low-signature nodes instead of a handful of exquisite assets. That shift enables a mesh of pickets for anti-submarine warfare, cable and pipeline protection, and maritime border security, with Blue Ocean’s operator heritage improving deploy-recover concepts that often trip up new entrants.

The SG-1 plus Lura stack is built for the dull, and dangerous end of undersea ISR. Persistent gliders can seed a wide-area acoustic picture, cueing crewed assets or larger UUVs while absorbing the risk of contact. Edge classification reduces satellite bandwidth demands, and swarm tactics allow navies to trade attrition-tolerant numbers for coverage and resilience. In contested electromagnetic environments, the low-power profile and seabed-hold mode complicate adversary detection. In practice, that means faster anomaly detection on windfarms, cables, and seabed junctions, and more resilient anti-submarine barriers in chokepoints.

After Nord Stream and the Balticconnector damage, NATO and EU elevated critical undersea infrastructure protection, with new tasking, exercises, and an intensified Baltic presence. AUKUS Pillar 2 has likewise prioritized autonomous undersea systems and AI as part of a trilateral tech surge. Against growing Russian underwater activity in the High North and Baltic, and Chinese seabed mapping farther afield, a fast-fielding, sovereign European undersea network becomes both deterrent and insurance. Helsing’s absorption of Blue Ocean is a bid to anchor that network in Europe and the UK while staying interoperable with AUKUS partners.