IN Brief:
- OpenWorks has established its US regional headquarters in Ashburn, Virginia.
- The company plans to open a manufacturing facility in Detroit during 2026.
- The expansion adds local commercial, engineering, and future production capacity to its North American counter-UAS business.
OpenWorks Engineering is expanding its physical presence in the United States, establishing a regional headquarters in Virginia and preparing a Detroit manufacturing facility as demand grows for its counter-UAS, air-defence, and autonomous optical systems.
OpenWorks Engineering has opened its US regional headquarters in Ashburn, Virginia, and says the Detroit production site is expected to open during 2026. The Northumberland-based company describes the expansion as a response to increasing US demand and a way to strengthen relationships with existing customers and integration partners.
Chris Bigwood has joined the business as executive vice president with responsibility for business development and corporate strategy in North America. He will also lead the planned opening of the Detroit facility, giving OpenWorks a dedicated US management structure as it moves beyond supplying the market principally from Britain.
The shift is industrially significant because a permanent headquarters and a manufacturing operation solve different problems. A local commercial and engineering presence can support trials, integration work, customer engagement, and programme development, while US production provides a route to shorter support chains and greater capacity if programmes progress from demonstrations and small orders into sustained procurement.
OpenWorks develops autonomous optical systems used in counter-UAS, air defence, surveillance, and targeting applications. Its Vision product family uses stabilised electro-optical hardware and onboard processing to detect, classify, and track targets, with systems designed to operate either independently or as part of larger architectures involving radar, radio-frequency sensors, acoustic equipment, command software, and effectors.
That integration model is particularly relevant to counter-UAS systems. A radar may provide the initial cue, an optical system can refine the track and assist identification, and the resulting data may then be passed into a command system or effector. Performance therefore depends on more than the specifications of one sensor: interfaces, target handover, latency, track quality, and common data formats all affect whether the complete chain works.
OpenWorks has been broadening its engineering activity around those interfaces. Its Special Projects business covers complex systems integration, sensor fusion, and the coupling of dynamic hardware with artificial intelligence, while its Products+ activity integrates third-party sensors and effectors with the company’s electro-optical equipment for applications including base protection, mobile air defence, critical infrastructure, and naval systems.
The company has also been expanding its workforce in Britain. OpenWorks says its teams have grown substantially over the past year as international demand has increased, while current company material places its workforce above 100 employees. The US expansion therefore adds to an existing growth programme rather than replacing the Prudhoe engineering and production base.
Running engineering and production activity on both sides of the Atlantic will place greater emphasis on configuration control. Optical sensors combine precision mechanical assemblies, electronics, software, processors, calibration data, and algorithms. If the same product is manufactured or supported at two sites, drawings, bills of material, firmware, test procedures, and calibration standards have to remain aligned.
Counter-UAS technology also changes quickly. Small drones continue to evolve in size, speed, communications methods, navigation, autonomy, and operating profiles, forcing detection and tracking systems to adapt through software and algorithm updates as well as hardware changes. A distributed manufacturing model therefore needs a common process for introducing those changes without allowing US and UK product baselines to diverge.
Detroit gives the company access to an established engineering and manufacturing labour pool, although OpenWorks has not yet disclosed the size, investment value, production capacity, or detailed product scope of the planned facility. Those figures will be important in establishing whether the site is intended principally for assembly and support or whether significant component manufacture and engineering will also move into the United States.
The company already has experience with US defence and security organisations. It delivered training to the FBI earlier this year, while its systems have been demonstrated with third-party sensors and effectors in American counter-UAS and air-defence applications. Establishing personnel permanently in Virginia should make that customer and integration work easier to sustain.
The next material milestone is the Detroit opening itself. Announcing a manufacturing site establishes intent; creating a repeatable production operation requires suppliers, quality systems, test equipment, skilled personnel, technical documentation, and repair processes to be in place before locally produced equipment can be treated as interchangeable with systems built elsewhere.
OpenWorks is therefore moving from an export-focused relationship with the US market towards a local industrial presence. Ashburn provides the regional headquarters, while Detroit is intended to add manufacturing. How much capability ultimately sits in Michigan will determine whether the expansion becomes a substantial second production base or remains a smaller local assembly and support operation alongside the company’s established Northumberland facilities.
