Down the memory lane, how all started and when?

Where Novus Rescue idea come from.

Haniya Zawar

7/18/20261 min read

How It All Started

The idea came first, long before the technology did.

Harri Mikkonen was still a trainee, in the earliest stages of his firefighter education, the first time he confronted the industry's oldest unsolved problem: once smoke fills a room, a firefighter is blind. Every drill, every simulation, every story from senior officers reinforced the same fact — visibility, not fire, was what got people killed and got rescues missed. Nobody had solved it.

Harri carried that problem with him through more than twenty years of active service, including time at the Abu Dhabi Al Bateen fire station alongside UAE Civil Defence. He knew, long before he had the means to fix it, that someone eventually would need to.

That someone was Pekka Jaatinen. A firefighter himself, a commercial helicopter pilot, and embedded systems engineer who builds what others declare impossible. Pekka's breakthrough came from a place nobody else was looking. In that moment, Harri's problem had its answer. A firefighter could see through smoke without giving up a single hand — no cable, no separate unit, no trade-off between seeing and searching.

It wasn't a grant-funded research question. It was a founder with hardware on a table, closing the gap Harri had been carrying since his first year of training.

Two firefighters, one problem lived from the inside and one solution built by hand — that partnership became the foundation of Novus Rescue Oy, founded in Seinäjoki, Finland in April 2024. Harri leads as CEO, pitching the product from two decades inside burning buildings, not from behind a desk. Pekka leads as CTO and Chairman, still building the next generation of the technology every week.

Deep Vision. Safe Mission.