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

Speaker 1: Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. It seems like way in Roku is in way better hands with Fox than Netflix. So it makes sense why the deal broke that way. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Hugo Frisk from Tenet Industries. He's the cofounder and CEO. Hugo, how are doing?

Speaker 8: What's going on? I'm doing great over here.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time. Introduce yourself and the company. How are doing?

Speaker 8: Yeah. So I'm Hugo. I'm cofounder of Tenet Industries. Mhmm. And we're focusing on mass producibility and low cost for the defense system, basically commoditizing it. Mhmm. So I'm from the electronics manufacturing industry. Mhmm. And my cofounder we're three cofounders, but the one of them is from the automotive industry. Mhmm. So basically taking this, like, mass producibility, those concepts Mhmm. And bringing them to the defense industry.

Speaker 1: How low cost how low cost do you wanna go? I mean, we're all familiar with, like, the couple $100 price point for a DJI product. Where do you wanna sit?

Speaker 8: Yeah. That's about it. It depends on the customer really. But, yeah, we want to match. Shipper than China is our slogan.

Speaker 1: Okay. Then and then how how are you thinking about the actual product? We've been hearing a lot about the fiber optic controlled drones that don't need to deal with wireless jamming or anything like that? Like where is the demand for the next generation product? Or is it just what we know from a DJI quadrotor, what we saw there? Are there any specific demands for the defense context that make it a little bit different than what's already out there?

Speaker 8: Yeah. There's the the main factor is the range, basically. Mhmm. It's it's range and the lift power. How much can you lift? What's the payload weight? So it's all about increasing the range. And the main limiting factor for the range is oftentimes the radio. Right? Mhmm. So what you want, that's why they're using like this fiber radios or these fiber optic cables because then you get longer range without getting jammed. But unfortunately, I think the fiber market, it's kind of only relevant for this bubble in time because to increase the range, which is the main like, what customers want, they want you can do either a better radio, basically. You can develop better radios.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 8: And that's maybe maybe the first step. The next step is doing autonomy. Right? Mhmm. If you have autonomy, then why do you need any contact at all?

Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. Everything. How how are you capable or do you think it's gonna be possible to do on device autonomy on a drone that size, two kilograms, that's not enough to run some serious GPU. But what what is possible these days?

Speaker 8: No. Exactly. You can put an immediate Jetson on it. But the immediate Jetson, it's like five times as expensive as the drone itself.

Speaker 3: Sure.

Speaker 8: So then it's not really a one time use kind of deal. Yeah. So but there are these embedded chips Okay. For for AI. It's just you can't run an LLM model on it. You can do some visual recognition, and maybe you can do some, like, prioritization of different targets. But the main main factor here about the autonomy is is not really the the vision model. That's that's like a solved problem. This is possible. The main problem there is is navigation. How do you get to the the near vicinity to your target? How do you arrive in like, navigating for 20 kilometers without the GPS? Because you can't use a GPS on the front line. It's not possible. It's jammed out. It's super easy to jam out GPS and to spoof it. They will say that you're in in China or something while you're in Ukraine or you're in Sweden or wherever. So that's the main problem. How do you navigate without the GPS? Because the the last mile, which is basically targeting, that's a solved problem that was solved in the sixties with missiles. I don't get the companies that are pitching that.

Speaker 1: What's I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: What is your what is your business model going to look like? Or what what does it look like today? You're trying to commoditize the category, push push pricing down as much as possible. But what are your margins going to look like? And how do you expect to structure deals with different buyers?

Speaker 8: So right now, kind of this pipeline. How do you scale a defense company? Because it's not really possible to get this as a new startup as deal straight to the state, at least not where we're looking in Europe. But so what you want to do is you start with the private companies, you sell to them. So we're selling to this counter US companies. This month, we went from five orders to three fifty orders. And then you start selling to this subprime, it's called, like basically you're selling to a company that's selling directly to the government. Mhmm. And those are really interesting because they have already the channels to sell to these governments. And then once you have established like your manufacturing line and your capability and people trust you, then you can sell directly to the governments.

Speaker 2: Chat asked Yep. How does how does their drone survive high power microwave machines like Leonidas? Is the answer that it doesn't but you can produce at such scale that you can kind of Or they're just these high powered microwave machines rolled

Speaker 1: out everywhere. But what what what is your take on microwave as a counter UAS force right now?

Speaker 8: I think microwave is like, we've tested with these people having shotguns and shooting down our drones with shotguns like radar controlled shotguns basically. Oh. And it's a short range system. It only reaches that system only reaches a 100 meters. I don't know about this this microwave. How how long is the reach that there, but I would guess it's pretty small. Yeah. So then you need a lot of these systems, and people don't have that. They don't have these systems every 100 meters.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not every military installation or unit is going to have every possible counter UAS, so it's sort of a game of rock paper scissors on the battlefield these days. Makes sense. And then

Speaker 8: the other thing is, like you said, like, just send more.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's that's what I that's what I was saying. It's like you have, you know, your five exquisite systems. Well, we're gonna, you know, out produce.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Is everything hand built right now? Are you already working on automation? I imagine that low cost manufacturability means more on supply chain and design, but what does the actual rollout look like over time?

Speaker 8: Yep. So when we started this, we were we wanted to produce with robots, still do. But basically, what we our our background is this manufacturing background. So we're really good at designing for manufacturing Mhmm. Designing it so it's it's really easy to assemble. So we designed it. So how would it be easy for a robot to build this? Mhmm. Well, then it needs a few parts and it needs a few screws and no soldering and it needs to be assembled all from one side. Mhmm. So that was the starting. And then it turns out once you do that, it's very, easy to assemble. So it takes two minutes for a human to assemble it.

Speaker 1: Wow.

Speaker 8: So then why do you need a robot?

Speaker 1: Good. Well, batch mate will have to make a pitch for you.

Speaker 2: How's investor interest so far? You've been busy the last couple weeks or are you starting a process now?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah. Super busy. It's actually my co founder, Emil, who's is doing that. Mhmm. So he's always on call and I'm doing customer demos and stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Very cool. Awesome. Well, congratulations.

Speaker 2: Great to meet you, Hugo.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

Speaker 2: Congrats on all the progress.

Speaker 1: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 8: Yeah. No problem. Cheers.

Speaker 1: Bye bye.

Speaker 2: Ryan Peterson says with yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career.

Speaker 1: These headlines are going to get crazy because I I mean, I I see some of them getting community noted, but it's like a single day will move more than like all of Bill Gates' currents net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are gonna pop off consistently. The crazy one is like it's there's going to be down days. Like, there's going to be just

Speaker 2: random Elon lost more money today than any person

Speaker 1: in the industry combined. He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know, and because, like, whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining. It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the $1,000,000,000,000 club.

Speaker 2: JB says, is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation. Well, we passed that. But the float is low until the lock of a nearly every retail investor on earth wants to be involved. You're gonna get stupid moves. Then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years.

Speaker 1: What does that mean?

Speaker 2: Just say good time. Just say you haven't seen the mass driver demo, buddy.

Speaker 1: Or or the next data center. I mean, that's the really interesting thing with Cursor. There's all this debate over like, have a deal with Anthropic. They have a deal with Google. Cursor obviously wants to compute. But talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term, and that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring neo cloud stuff that monetizes really well. And then that provides you know, it's like the model three. It's it's it's gonna be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, mass driver on the moon, all that stuff needs fuel for the fire. Anyway

Speaker 2: Ad Ludlow has some data. SpaceX, the current approximate price to sales is 150

Speaker 10: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: X. Amazon is 3.6. Microsoft, 9.2.

Speaker 1: See, people read this as a bear SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price of sales.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Be probably be like a $100,000,000,000,000 company. Anyway, our next guest might be building the next $100,000,000,000,000 company. We have Payton Case from dispatch here, building reentry vehicles. We're returning space manufactured payloads in semiconductor biotech and pharma. Welcome to the show, Payton.