Team Novus Rescue

Who we are

7/18/20262 min read

white concrete building during daytime
white concrete building during daytime

Introducing Novus Rescue: Deep Vision. Safe Mission.

Every firefighter who has walked into a burning building knows the moment: the smoke closes in, and the environment they trained for becomes invisible. Harri Mikkonen carried that problem for years — through more than two decades as a firefighter in Finland, through his training as a mechanical engineer, through active service that took him from Finnish stations to Abu Dhabi's Al Bateen fire station alongside UAE Civil Defence. Smoke-blindness wasn't an abstract industry gap to him. It was the reason firefighters got hurt.

The answer came from Pekka Jaatinen, a fellow firefighter and self-taught embedded systems engineer with a habit of building what others call impossible. Pekka pointed a set of VR goggles at a thermal camera feed and solved, in that moment, a problem the industry had failed to crack for decades. The result is the world's first hands-free 3D thermal vision system for active firefighters — a heads-up display that delivers real-time spatial awareness in zero-visibility smoke, without ever taking a firefighter's hands off their tools.

Novus Rescue was founded in April 2024 in Seinäjoki, Finland, to bring that breakthrough to the firefighters who need it. The product launches in Q2 2026, with the Nordics, UAE and wider GCC, Europe and the US as our target markets.

A team built from the problem itself

Novus Rescue's founding group has lived the risks this technology is built to reduce. Harri leads as CEO, pitching from two decades inside burning buildings rather than from behind a desk. Pekka serves as CTO and Chairman, working weekly on the next generation of the product alongside Severi Uusitalo, our Industrial Design Lead. Severi brings twenty patents and five years designing fire and rescue equipment at Kemira Safety and Scott Health & Safety, in Finland and the US, plus a research background at Nokia and a fellowship at the 17tech defence incubator — and he has flown as a commercial helicopter pilot since 1992, giving him a pilot's instinct for equipment that has to perform when everything else has failed.

That instinct runs through the team. Pekka is himself a commercial helicopter pilot and instructor, and he trained both Severi and Mikko Salmivuori to fly. Mikko, a co-founder and board member with a financial markets background across two IPO teams, still chooses Pekka as his co-pilot. Kari Rintala, a shareholder and strategic advisor with an M.Sc. in Electronics, spent over thirty years evaluating technology ventures at Tekes — Finland's national technology funding agency, the equivalent of Abu Dhabi's Mubadala — and rates Novus Rescue in the top 10% of every company he has assessed. Leading our UAE and GCC market entry is Haniya Zawar, a registered nurse with direct ambulance experience in Finland, working the frontline alongside firefighters before she brought that understanding into strategic partnerships.