Hiraiwa – We Save Our Defenders’ Lives

Hiraiwa Defence Solutions

We Save Our Defenders’ Lives

Who are we?

Hiraiwa Defence Solutions is a European defence company, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and operating across Europe.

Founded in 2024, our mission is to conceptualise, engineer and produce disruptive and cost effective defensive solutions for the modern battlefield.

We are working to become a European leader specialised in highly demanded defence systems against modern unmanned and autonomous threats.

Hiraiwa provides more speed in thinking, designing, testing, producing, distributing and upgrading, than its competitors, which is in line with the challenges of today’s geo-political and resulting military needs.

Our name is Japanese, which reflects both our inspiration by the disciplined simplicity and effectiveness of the Samurai, and our founders’ personal connections with Japan.

What is our story?

Hiraiwa Defence Solutions was founded in early 2024 by Xavier Pinchart and Willem Mulock Houwer, who were appalled at the vulnerability of dismounted infantry to First Person View (FPV) attack drones.

Hiraiwa was born from our vision to defend the soldiers, who protect our European values and way of life, from the growing lethal sophistication of AI-powered technological weapons, such as military mini- and micro-UAVs.

We believe that fast developing technological threats to individual soldiers need to be countered by an equally rapid response from providers of counter-measures.

Hiraiwa focuses on developing defensive solutions that are rapidly deployable, to provide effective protection to those who risk their lives to protect our society.

Xavier

Managing Partner

Willem

NED

How do we work?

We believe in the power of fusion of disparate problem-solving concepts to deliver true innovation, and defence solutions that are relevant for our battlefield users, to help save the lives of the soldiers who are protecting us.

We do this by:

Shortening solution time-to-market development to 12-24 months.
End-user system acceptance: soldiers are validating every system development milestone. We make sure our systems are practical, capable, usable and effectively making a difference on the frontline.
Reducing dependencies and avoiding single points of failure, by controlling solution development, production and supply organically, and with trusted agile partners.
Ensuring that our products are mission adaptive, as the modern battlefield requires every deployed system to dynamically adapt to rapidly evolving environments. We use an open neuronal system
architecture, which is able to reorganise data computational processes.
Building our products to be cost-effective commodities, suitable for mass-production and fast distribution

Our current developments/solutions

Hiraiwa is working on two projects aimed at providing protection of dismounted infantry at platoon, squad and team levels.

MESIS (Meshed Situational Awareness System):
MESIS is an independent, lightweight, auto-healing WANET (Wireless Ad hoc NETwork), based on throw-and-forget nodes the size of a grenade. MESIS serves as an UGS (Unattended Ground Sensor) system, reporting SALUTE (Size/activity/unit description/time/equipment load) situational information to detect friendly or enemy activities, such as UAV detection, vehicle or troop movement.

MESIS detects, identifies, locates, and tracks enemy and friendly battlefield activity, and reports to soldiers and/or higher command and control echelons.

Typical missions: protection of frontline positions, surveillance of unattended battlefield/front-line/border areas, aerial trajectory analysis, triangulation of artillery rounds.

BUSS (Battlefield UAV Suppression System):
BUSS is a one-man portable C-sUAS platform for detecting and suppressing Class 1 and 2 UAVs. Operating at very short range (VSHORAD), BUSS creates a locally controlled safety dome capable of increasing the survivability of battlefield assets exposed to UAS threats, such as loitering munitions. This low-layer system is designed to offer a proximity solution to dismounted troops. BUSS merges an adaption of MESIS with drone suppression.

Typical missions: protection of mobile infantry squads, frontline positions, isolated artillery/mortar assets against Class 1 and 2 UAVs.

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Contact

info@hiraiwa.eu
Hiraiwa SRL company ID: BE079.7732.651

Our people

As an integral part of our modern European values, Hiraiwa Defence Solutions supports diversity and equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination on grounds of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, disability, philosophical and religious beliefs, cultural background, health status and language.