Frankenburg Technologies, the missile startup that aims to build lower-cost guided interceptor systems in Europe, has taken aim at something else, a fresh €100 million in funding. News of the new fundraise was first reported by Bloomberg on Monday. Resilience Media has now confirmed the details with a source at the company.
It is not clear which investors are involved. If closed, the round may rocket the 2.5-year-old company to “unicorn” status — valued at a billion dollars or higher.
Investors are pouring a lot of money into defence tech startups at the moment: PitchBook data published in May noted that Q1 investment in the wider resilience sector — which includes not just equipment and services for the battlefield such as drones, but also areas like quantum computing, biotechnology, alternative energy and space — was up nearly 28.6% year-on-year, to $19.8 billion.
Frankenburg is capturing some of that attention, too.
It was only earlier this year, in February 2025, that the startup closed a Series A of €30 million led by Plural with participation from Smartcap, the Estonian publicly-funded VC.
Our sources indicated to us at the time that the company was raising that money at a valuation of around $400 million. With its Series A, Frankenburg set a goal to produce 200 missiles daily, establishing production facilities in Germany and in the UK through partnerships with the likes of Babcock.
Along with that increased production pace, other signs pointed to more money coming down the line for Frankenburg very soon: we’d heard that more money was being raised and that other big investors were connected. These latest reports of the Series B could connect those dots.
(Other current Frankenburg backers include Expeditions, Blossom Capital, Shellona and MM Grupp, and the CEO of Milrem Robotics, Kuldar Vaarsi.)
Milrem Robotics MoU
Frankenburg is also continuing to build bridges with the wider ecosystem. Its latest partnership announcement came earlier this month, when it signed a memorandum of understanding with fellow Estonian defence tech company Milrem Robotics, which develops robotics and unmanned ground systems for defence.
Milrem, one of the bigger producers of UGVs among startups in Europe, will integrate Frankenburg’s Mark I — a compact, precision-guided missile-style interceptor — to launch from Milrem’s unmanned ground vehicles. The Mark I is Frankenburg’s first (and currently only) hardware offering.
The partnership will ‘create a new category of distributed short-range air defence solutions designed to protect critical national infrastructure and military installations against increasingly large-scale drone threats,’ according to the joint announcement.
“The era of scarce air defence is ending,” Kusti Salm, CEO of Frankenburg Technologies, said in the announcement of the partnership. “Together with Milrem Robotics, we are putting affordable guided missiles on robotic combat platforms, enabling mobile short-range air defence at a scale and cost that was previously economically impossible.”
Salm declined to comment for this story.
As we have noted previously, Frankenburg has an impressive network of Baltic movers and shakers connected to it.
Taavi Madiberk — who is credited as the (sole) co-founder and is now the company’s non-executive chairman — is also the CEO and founder of the next-generation energy storage/battery startup Skeleton Technologies (which, interestingly, now appears to be making its own forays into C-UAS technology).
Martin Herem, an Estonian retired military commander, is an advisor. In addition to being a strategic investor, Milrem Robotics’s Vaarsi is also a board member And Salm, who joined as CEO in September 2024, has a pretty impressive resume, too: he’s a director at the NATO Innovation Fund (itself a prominent defence tech investor) and he was previously the permanent secretary in Estonia’s Ministry of Defence, among other roles.
This story will be updated as it develops.
