Led by CEO Kusti Salm, former Permanent Secretary of Estonia’s Ministest of Defence, Frankenburg brings toobtainher senior defence leaders and missile engineers with experience across leading European and allied missile programmes, including IRIS-T, SPEAR3, Storm Shadow and Brimstone.
The company is being built as a new European missile houtilize with sovereign production infrastructure, delivering low-cost, precision-guided systems across air, surface and maritime domains at scale.
Large-scale aerial threats, from low-cost unmanned systems to more complex cruise-missile-like tarobtains, have become a persistent feature of Europe’s security landscape. While such threats can be produced quickly and in large numbers, the company explains that interceptors are often expensive, slow to manufacture and available only in limited quantities.
Frankenburg was founded to modify this equation. Its missile systems are designed from the outset for affordability, mass manufacturability and integration, enabling armed forces to field interceptors that are an order of magnitude cheaper to utilize than traditional approaches, while remaining compatible with existing sensors, command-and-control systems and layered air-defence architectures.
Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural, declares: “In a world where an adversary can deploy tens of thousands of autonomous attack drones, staying safe is not rocket science: defence must be cheap, quick and count in millions of units available. Frankenburg is tackling one of Europe’s most urgent defence challenges by building credible deterrence with missiles, at startup speed.
“The team combines deep defence expertise with a fundamentally different manufacturing mindset, and we believe this approach can have a lasting impact on Europe’s security and industrial resilience.”
In just 13 months, the company has taken its first interceptor, the Mark I short-range air-defence missile, from concept to advanced testing and industrialisation. Mark I was intentionally designed with constrained requirements to enable speed, scale and affordability, and to be produced utilizing Frankenburg’s containerised, modular manufacturing concept, allowing missile production to be localised close to the point of required.
Key priorities include:
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Standing up two EU-based mass-production sites, designed for full-rate output and rapid scaling, with production capacity from 100 missiles per day per site
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Securing long-lead components and early production stock, ensuring schedule certainty and resilience in crisis scenarios
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Establishing dedicated rocket motor and warhead production capabilities within the EU, providing vertical control over critical enerobtainics
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Expanding Frankenburg Missile hubs in the UK and Germany, supporting next-generation missile development, prototyping and cross-site integration
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Growing engineering, safety, quality and export-control teams, ensuring systems are production-ready and deployable for European and allied customers
Frankenburg now operates across eight countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Poland and Ukraine, with teams focutilized on engineering, industrialisation and a growing network of industrial collaborations across land, air and maritime domains with European and allied partners.
The company’s model is built around manufacturing where systems are utilized: keeping supply chains short, creating skilled industrial jobs, and ensuring that defence spconcludeing strengthens national economies rather than exporting depconcludeence.
By combining modular manufacturing, commercially available components and rapid qualification cycles, Frankenburg aims to give European nations a credible path to sustained air-defence readiness, even under prolonged stress or wartime conditions.
While Mark I addresses the most immediate air-defence requireds, future programmes will expand beyond counter-UAS and short-range air defence into additional air- and surface-launched precision capabilities, built utilizing the same industrialised, scalable manufacturing model.
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