Galvion

Galvion builds two things for dismounted soldiers and works hard to make them one thing. The first is ballistic head protection. The second is the power and data plumbing that keeps the night vision, radios and sensors bolted to that head running. The company is the former parent of Revision Military and adopted the Galvion name in November 2019, after selling the protective eyewear business to Asgard Partners. What remained was the armor, soldier power, electronics and advanced concepts work. It was founded in 2002, is privately held, and employs roughly 400 people across five sites: a Montreal head office, helmet and armor manufacturing in Newport Vermont, a Warfighter Lab in Portsmouth New Hampshire, a Massachusetts operation and a UK office near Bristol.

The head protection line trades under the Batlskin name. Caiman is the workhorse modular ballistic helmet, with a search and rescue variant, and it was selected by Canada's Department of National Defence. Viper is the more configurable modular head protection system, and Hellbender is the lighter tactical shell. Around the shells Galvion sells the mandibles, visors, rails, retention systems and liners that turn a helmet into a platform. Newport is where the shells are actually pressed, and it carries the US Coast Guard work, UK VIRTUS production and the next generation Dutch helmet system.

Power and data is the half of the company that is less obvious from photographs and arguably more differentiated. The Nerv Centr range exists because a modern infantry section carries a dozen devices on a dozen different batteries. Squad Power Manager is a soldier-worn hub that interoperates with more than 250 battery and device types, scavenging from vehicle power, solar panels or captured local sources and routing it where it is needed. MAX-8 is the Mission Adaptive Charging Station, a field unit that draws from almost any input and charges mixed battery chemistries simultaneously without reprogramming. SoloPack and the higher capacity SoloPack II are the wearable lithium-ion batteries that sit under all of it, the second generation carrying about 40 percent more energy for missions running up to a day. E.D.G. handles headborne power and data distribution and BATLCHRG covers wireless charging. The US Department of Defense has placed repeat orders for MAX-8 and Squad Power Manager.

The third strand is advanced capability work. CORTEX is Galvion's integration platform for smart head systems, the layer meant to tie sensors, hearing protection, comms and display into a single managed load. The Portsmouth Warfighter Lab supports this with virtual reality testing and cognitive and physical load measurement, which is a fairly unusual thing for a company this size to run in house.

Galvion divested its vehicle power division to Stryten Energy in 2021, so the current business is squarely soldier-borne rather than platform-level. It supplies helmets to US forces, NATO members and other allied militaries, and its relatively small size against the primes is offset by owning both halves of a problem most competitors only address on one side.