We have led a growth investment in Helin, a company building the Industrial Edge Intelligence Platform that brings real-time AI to complex industrial assets. The capital will be used to accelerate Helin’s commercialisation across maritime, offshore energy, and critical industrial infrastructure, while further strengthening its edge AI and security capabilities. During 2025, Helin has also attracted non dilutive funding from Rabobank.
Helin replaces fragmented on-site software and slow cloud analytics with a single, secure platform that runs directly on industrial assets such as vessels, offshore platforms, and remote energy sites. The platform combines hardware, software, and connectivity in one system, allowing customers to deploy applications quickly without changing their IT setup.
Because the software runs on site, Helin continues to operate when connectivity drops. This enables real-time decisions in offshore and remote environments where delays, downtime, or loss of control are not an option.
Helin is live on more than 400 vessels and industrial sites worldwide, operating across all continents except Antarctica. The platform supports 500+ assets running without continuous cloud connectivity.
Over the past three years, Helin’s signed ARR has grown twelve-fold, representing more than 100% year-on-year growth. Expansion is driven by a land-and-expand enterprise sales model, with net revenue retention of 148%.
Customers include global operators such as Boskalis, Shell, BP, Noble Corp, Stena, and Sunrock. These customers use Helin to improve uptime, reduce fuel consumption, optimise energy usage, and increase safety across mission-critical operations.
“Helin has proved the value of its product with the most demanding clients,” said Paul Pruijmboom, Partner at FORWARD.one and Board Member at Helin. “The platform is deployed, expanding, and retained by industrial customers. This investment is about accelerating sales execution and enterprise-level rollouts.”
“We already run in demanding industrial environments,” said Martijn Handels, CPTO of Helin. “This investment allows us to scale deployments faster while continuing to meet strict requirements on uptime, latency, and security.”
The new capital will be used to:
Helin was recently named Most Innovative Scale-up of 2024, recognising its category-defining role in industrial edge intelligence.
Europe’s industrial sectors have largely solved basic connectivity and data collection. The harder problem is where intelligence actually runs. Many critical assets operate offshore, at sea, or in remote energy and industrial environments where bandwidth is limited, latency is expensive, and connectivity can be lost at any time. In these settings, sending data to the cloud is too slow or simply not possible. Decisions about safety, energy use, and asset performance have to be made on site.
This reality has made edge computing operationally decisive. Running applications locally allows vessels to optimise fuel consumption in real time, offshore platforms to continue operating safely during connectivity loss, and energy assets to manage loads and faults without waiting for cloud instructions. Regulatory pressure, including frameworks such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act, further reinforces the need for secure, on-site processing rather than cloud-only architectures.
The Dutch industrial ecosystem reflects these conditions. Maritime operations, oil & gas, offshore energy, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure play an outsized role in the economy, forcing technology to work under harsh, real-world constraints. As a result, the Netherlands has become a practical testbed for edge intelligence, where latency, uptime, and security are daily operational requirements rather than design assumptions.
Technology without commercial deployment is just expensive science. We follow performance, not plans.
