About
Built by the people who built the sensors
Balor Defense is a veteran-owned defense R&D firm in the Greater Philadelphia area, building event-based vision and edge autonomy for the last seconds of an engagement.
Why Balor exists
We have spent years executing SBIR programs on event-based imaging, edge inference and autonomous sensing for the Navy, the Army and USSOCOM. That work produced a capability with a specific and increasingly urgent application: seeing and holding a small, fast, low-signature air target through the last seconds of an engagement.
Balor is that capability, productized — so it can reach interceptor programs, weapon fire-control programs and point-defense integrators as a product line rather than as a research result buried in a final report.
The name is deliberate. Balór na Súile Nimhe — the eye that stays sealed and silent until the scene moves, then fires. It is a fair description of the sensor.
How we work
A small, senior team of graduate-degreed engineers that designs, builds and tests entirely in-house. Sensor, firmware, estimator and mechanical design get argued out in the same room rather than across a subcontract.
Competencies span AI/ML, autonomy, event-based vision, embedded and FPGA systems, and sensor fusion. Leadership has led sensing SBIR programs for the Navy, the Army and USSOCOM, with defense acquisition and event-sensor engineering depth on the team.
All personnel are U.S. citizens.
Contracting Profile
How to buy from us
| Founded | 2020, Greater Philadelphia area |
|---|---|
| Business status | Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business; SBA-certified SDVOSB, 2023 |
| NAICS | 541710 — research & development in the physical, engineering and life sciences |
| Personnel | All personnel are U.S. citizens |
| Registration | Active in SAM.gov |
| CAGE / UEI | Provided on request |
| Vehicles | SBIR/STTR Phase I–III; subcontract to prime; direct contract |
| Security | CMMC Level 2 readiness in progress |
| Location | Greater Philadelphia area, Pennsylvania, USA |
Facility
Design, build and fly in one place
- 7,000 ft² of in-house design, fabrication and test space
- 13-acre private outdoor range for field test
- Electronics design and bring-up: Altium, FPGA toolchains, instrumented bench
- Mechanical design and fabrication: SolidWorks through to hardware
- Software and modeling: MATLAB/Simulink, ROS 2, Python, C++
- Field and captive-carry test iteration without external range scheduling
The practical effect is cycle time. A change identified in a Tuesday field test can be in fabrication the same week.
Working with us
We are most useful early — while the sensing approach for an interceptor or a fire control system is still an open question rather than a locked baseline.