Tenet - Low-cost, mass-produced strike drones

TL;DR

Tenet builds low-cost, mass-producible strike drones.

By obsessing over manufacturability, we can build systems that are dramatically cheaper, faster to produce, and easier to scale than traditional defense hardware.

Our first product, Midsummer, is a low-cost kamikaze quadcopter.

Our mission is to apply our design and manufacturing systems to all ranges of defense products including low-cost strike systems, loitering munitions and missiles.

THE PROBLEM

The US spent $30 billion in two months fighting Iran. A single Tomahawk costs $3M. A single Patriot interceptor costs $4M. Meanwhile, Russia and Iran are winning the long-game with $30k Shaheds and $500 FPVs.

The math doesn't work. Russia's war against Ukraine and the war in Iran proves that low-cost, mass-manufactured systems are critical to obtain victory.

THE CAUSE

Traditional defense contractors optimize for performance. Manufacturing is an afterthought.

The process typically looks like this:

Requirements → engineering optimization → manufacturing.

That’s how you end up with a $3M missile. We reverse the process.

OUR APPROACH

We start with manufacturing processes and the target unit economics, then design the product backwards from there. The tradeoff is that aggressively reducing hardware cost also slightly reduces hardware capability. Thus our software has to compensate for problems legacy systems solve with expensive components and high-tech materials. This creates two compounding advantages:

1. Our software becomes a core differentiator

2. Our hardware is inherently scalable because it was designed for manufacturing from day one.

Defense primes are still building the equivalent of Ferraris and Bugattis.

We’re building the F-150.

WHAT WE'VE BUILT

In four months, we’ve built:

• Custom all-in-one flight computer HW,

• Custom flight SW

• Encrypted and ultra broad-band frequency-hopping system

Our first product, Midsummer, is a low-cost kamikaze quadcopter designed for mass production.

Key metrics:

• Assembly time under 2 minutes

• Cheaper than drones in Ukraine, half the amount of parts, one PCB instead of four.

• Designed for manufacturing scalability from day one