Tenet Industries is building sub-$500 combat drones — cheaper than China — for European defense markets

Tenet Industries

Hugo Frisk is trying to do to combat drones what Foxconn did to consumer electronics: strip out cost through manufacturing discipline rather than engineering novelty. The pitch is blunt. "Cheaper than China is our slogan."

Frisk and his co-founders bring backgrounds in electronics manufacturing and automotive supply chains, and the product design philosophy follows directly from that. Tenet engineered its drones to be assembled from one side, with minimal parts, no soldering, and few screws — the kind of design-for-manufacturing rigor typically applied to car components. The result: a human assembler can put one together in two minutes, which made the planned robotics line redundant before it launched.

The sub-$500 price point is the target, roughly matching DJI consumer hardware, and the commercial logic holds only if volume follows. Frisk describes a staged go-to-market: sell first to private counter-UAS companies, then to defense primes and subcontractors that already have government procurement channels, and eventually direct to European militaries once manufacturing credibility is established. The traction signal he cites is orders scaling from 5 to 350 in a single month.

“Cheaper than China is our slogan... This month, we went from five orders to three hundred fifty orders. And then you start selling to this subprime — basically you're selling to a company that's selling directly to the government.”

The hard technical problem

On the product roadmap, the competitive tension isn't targeting — Frisk argues that's been solved since the 1960s with missiles and doesn't understand why startups keep pitching it. The unsolved problem is GPS-denied navigation over distances of 20-plus kilometers. GPS is trivially jammed or spoofed on the front line, and fiber optic control — currently fashionable because it sidesteps radio jamming — is, in Frisk's view, a transitional fix rather than a durable one. The endgame is autonomy, which eliminates the need for any communications link. Embedded AI chips can handle visual recognition and target prioritization at drone scale, but navigating across kilometers without GPS remains the genuine bottleneck.

On counter-drone threats, Frisk is skeptical that directed-energy systems like high-power microwave weapons are a decisive counter at current deployment density. Radar-controlled shotguns in testing reached only about 100 meters. The underlying logic of Tenet's model holds regardless: if no adversary can deploy point defenses every 100 meters, volume production at sub-$500 per unit turns saturation into a viable military tactic.

Fundraising is active. Frisk says his co-founder Emil is handling investor conversations full-time while Frisk runs customer demos — a split that implies a process already underway, though no figures were disclosed.