Aerospace & Defense Software

Mission software,
engineered for the edge.

Vaiden builds resilient edge-AI, sensing, and secure communications software for aerospace and defense, with systems that run offline, in contested environments, on low-power hardware.

Strix field terminal held against a mountain landscape with mesh sensor network glowing at night
What we do

Capabilities across the full stack

From bare-metal firmware to operator dashboards, we engineer software that performs where infrastructure is scarce and reliability is non-negotiable.

Embedded & Edge Software

Real-time firmware for resource-constrained microcontrollers, power-aware, fault-tolerant, and built to run unattended for months.

Firmware · RTOS · Low-power

Sensor & Signal Processing

Acoustic and DSP pipelines: FFT, spectral analysis, beamforming, and feature extraction tuned to detect faint signatures in noisy environments.

DSP · Acoustics · FFT

Edge Machine Learning

TinyML model training and on-device inference. Classification that runs in milliseconds on hardware with kilobytes of RAM, with no server round-trip.

TinyML · Inference · MFCC

Resilient Mesh Comms

Long-range mesh networking with multi-hop forwarding, automatic re-routing, and encrypted over-the-air updates, designed to keep working when the grid does not.

Mesh · Long-range · OTA

Secure Systems

Encrypted storage, signed firmware, hardware-backed key isolation, and threat modeling for devices that may be captured, jammed, or operated air-gapped.

Encryption · Signing · Key isolation

Software Consulting & R&D

End-to-end engineering: prototyping, dashboards, cloud and edge integration, and rapid R&D for defense-grade applications. From concept to fielded system.

Prototyping · Dashboards · Integration
Defense

Detection & autonomy for contested environments

Sensing, decision-making, and secure communications that keep working when the infrastructure is gone, jammed, or never existed. Our flagship defense system is Strix.

STRIX

Strix detects, classifies, and helps localize small drones purely by sound, including fiber-optic, autonomous, and FPV units that emit no RF and stay invisible to radar and radio scanners.

  • RF-silent: emits nothing while listening, so it cannot be located by hostile scanners
  • Fully offline: mesh alerting with no internet, cellular, or cloud required
  • Solar-powered nodes from ~$50 in COTS parts, palm-sized and expendable by design
  • On-device ML detection, under 500 ms from sound to alert
Strix solar-powered acoustic sensor node
50–200 m
Acoustic range
~$50
Per node
~150 g
Field-ready
Live map
Field terminal
2–10 km
Mesh range
~7–10 mA
Draw
Aerospace

Beyond defense: science, simulation, and space

Vaiden applies the same engineering rigor to problems beyond the atmosphere. Whether it's spacecraft autonomy, large-scale simulation, computational biology, or quantum algorithms, we build software that performs under hard constraints.

  • Flight software, ground systems, and on-board autonomy for satellites
  • High-fidelity simulation: air-traffic, mission planning, multi-agent modeling
  • Bioinformatics and computational biology pipelines
  • Quantum computing applied to optimization and trajectory problems

Founded by a former NASA software engineer (Ames, JPL). 20+ years across embedded systems, signal processing, simulation, and security.

Contact

Custom engineering, early-stage R&D, and consulting across aerospace, simulation, computational science, and defense software. We'll reply with what's feasible.

How we build

Principles that survive the field

Our software is shaped by deployments where there is no network, no maintenance window, and no second chance.

01

Offline-first

Every core function works with zero connectivity. Internet is an optional convenience, never a dependency.

02

Secure by design

Encrypted storage, signed updates, and hardware key isolation, assuming devices can be captured or jammed.

03

Low-cost & COTS

Commercial off-the-shelf hardware and lean firmware keep unit cost low enough to deploy at scale.

04

Field-informed

Designs are validated against real-world conditions and refined from field-test data, not lab assumptions.

About Vaiden

A software company for hard environments

Vaiden LLC is a software company focused on aerospace and defense. We design and build edge-AI, sensing, and secure communications software, from embedded firmware to the operator dashboards that sit on top of it.

Our flagship system, Strix, is a passive acoustic drone-detection platform built on these capabilities. We apply the same engineering to consulting and custom projects for partners who need software that works when the infrastructure does not.

  • Edge-AI and on-device inference
  • Real-time sensing & signal processing
  • Resilient, encrypted mesh networking
  • Web dashboards & cloud integration
  • Consulting, prototyping & R&D
Get in touch

Tell us what you need

Whether it's counter-drone systems, custom defense software, R&D partnerships, or consulting, we'd like to hear about it.

Web

www.vaidenlabs.com

Address

Vaiden LLC
NASA Ames Research Center
P.O. 117, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA