SunCubes and Mirai Partner to Keep Uncrewed Maritime Systems Powered Longer and Protected from Drones

Small, low-cost drones have reshaped the threat picture at sea and along the coast: they are cheap to field, hard to stop with conventional systems, and increasingly used across domains: in the air, on the surface and below it. At the same time, navies and critical-infrastructure operators want to do more with uncrewed systems and keep them on station longer, with less human exposure and Europe needs capabilities it can build and control itself.

SunCubes and Mirai are partnering to answer exactly these needs, combining SunCubes’  control-layer technologies for optical power systems with Mirai’s AI-driven maritime autonomy. A Memorandum of Understanding, signed in June 2026, sets the framework. The goal is a joint, complementary offering the two companies will take to market into European and national defence programmes.

Together, the two companies are working on two fronts.

The first is persistence. SunCubes’ laser power-beaming transmits energy as a directed beam to a receiver on the target platform, recharging uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs), aerial systems (UAS) and instrumented sensors or buoys in the field, with no cabling or battery swaps. Mirai’s autonomous system, MIRAI OS, folds energy availability into mission planning and swarm coordination, deciding when and where to draw power and routing it between platforms, so assets stay on station far beyond battery limits, including inter-platform transfer, such as a USV recharging an airborne or distributed asset.

The second is self-protection against drones. The partners are jointly exploring drone defense architectures for naval and USV configurations. Mirai’s MIRAI OS provides detection, classification and decision support; SunCubes contributes laser pointing, beam control and optical-integration know-how at system level. Integrated, the architecture lets an uncrewed surface platform detect an aerial threat and cue a non-kinetic laser response, protecting the platform without putting a crew in the line of fire.

What comes next. The partners will run joint proof-of-concept demonstrations to validate the integrated architectures, and pursue joint opportunities in European and national defence-innovation programmes, including the European Defence Fund, with a coordinated go-to-market across Italy and selected European markets.

“This MoU is an important step in broadening the application scope of SunCubes’ optical power control technologies,” said Alberto Chiozzi, CEO and Co-Founder of SunCubes. “Persistent autonomy requires more than individual platforms. It requires energy, control, mission logic, and system integration to work together. By combining SunCubes’ work on optical power control with Mirai’s mission autonomy capabilities, we can explore architectures where unmanned systems operate with greater endurance, coordination, and resilience.”

“Combining SunCubes’ laser power and beam-control technology with our autonomy lets uncrewed maritime systems stay on station longer and protect themselves, the kind of sovereign, dual-use capability European navies and critical-infrastructure operators are asking for,” said Luciano Belviso, CEO and Co-Founder of Mirai.

About SunCubes

SunCubes is a deep-tech company developing optical power systems based on laser technology. The company builds the control layer of optical power: the systems, software, control logic, and integration layer required to point, track, stabilize, manage, and safely deliver optical power over distance. SunCubes’ broader vision is to make light a new utility layer for energy transmission and high-precision optical systems, enabling new forms of cable-free autonomy and optical power delivery where conventional infrastructure is impractical, expensive, or operationally limiting.

About Mirai

Mirai is an Italian Physical AI company. It builds multi-domain autonomy and orchestration intelligence for uncrewed systems, from its own autonomous surface vessels to MIRAI OS, the hardware-agnostic software layer that runs and coordinates them. Autonomy runs on-edge, turning each platform into an autonomous node that navigates, perceives and decides. The technology is dual-use, spanning port and critical-infrastructure protection, seabed and subsea-cable security, counter-mine, anti-drone and ISR.

Press contacts:

SunCubes — communication@suncubes.space 

Mirai — hello@miraitech.ai