Company

Message from the CEO

Flood control and water use embody the wisdom of those who came before us. Long before anyone could see the land from the sky or compute the movement of water and sediment, people read the terrain and the flow of rivers, boldly rerouting channels, building flexible flood defenses such as open levees, and digging canals that sustained daily life. Remembering the many lives lost along the way, learning from our predecessors and passing their wisdom on to the future is, I believe, what matters most for a river engineer.

Today we can measure underwater terrain from satellites and airborne lasers, and forecast rainfall and water levels hours ahead. This progress has come from combining river engineering with technologies from other fields, so we must keep learning across disciplinary boundaries.

Yet learning alone is not enough. What matters is grasping the situation and challenges in the field, learning the technology to solve them, and putting it into practice, and having the will to improve step by step through both success and failure. By building on that practice, we want to be a company our clients see as a true partner, and a place where people who share this spirit come together.

Kazutake Asahi, President & CEO

Kazutake Asahi

Ph.D. (Engineering). Graduated from the Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University (numerical analysis of bedforms in Prof. Yasuyuki Shimizu's laboratory). After working at Mizuho Information & Research Institute, Recruit and the Hokkaido River Foundation, he founded RiverLink in 2014. He also serves as Representative Director of iRIC-UC.

Adjunct lecturer at Waseda University (2016–2023), Meijo University (2015–2018) and Hiroshima University (2025–).

History

• 2014RiverLink Co., Ltd. founded in September. Held a river-engineering course for an engineering consultant in the founding month and began iRIC workshops the following month. First contracts from national research institutes (X-band radar data review; a fish-habitat assessment tool).
• 2015Integrated a consulting firm's proprietary 2D model into iRIC (followed by improvements and developer training). Adjunct lecturer at Meijo University (until 2018).
• 2016Worked on a real-time flood analysis system for a research institute and reproduced the 2015 Kinu River flood. Adjunct lecturer at Waseda University (until 2023). Released iRIC version 3 (beta). Spoke at an iRIC workshop in Hong Kong and an international conference in Seoul.
• 2017iRIC-UC (general incorporated association) founded in October. Began developing RICPlace, a web system for sharing river disaster and environmental information, expanding into web and GIS. First work in the power sector, including reservoir sedimentation analysis.
• 2018RICPlace launched on the cloud (AWS) and used by the survey team after the Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake. Began linking the RRI model with iRIC and DIAS, and developing a 3D flood hazard map.
• 2019Joined R&D on estimating levee and channel conditions with satellite SAR. Delivered 28 projects in the year.
• 2020First contract from the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management. Implemented RRI as an iRIC solver and tested it on the July 2020 Kuma River flood. Built an automated system for a university's nationwide flood forecasts.
• 2021Started Python workshops for engineers. Created a flood simulation for a museum exhibit projected onto a sand model.
• 2022Launched and chaired the Numerical Analysis Support Tools WG of the JSCE Committee on Hydroscience and Hydraulic Engineering. Held a briefing on developing solvers for iRIC v4. Developed a web system for viewing floods in 3D.
• 2023Released iRIC version 4 (design and development). Taught at the international iRIC course in Lyon, France, and an English RRI course at PWRI ICHARM. Developed iric2blender for 3D CG rendering of iRIC results. Calculated flood risk for corporate climate disclosure (TCFD).
• 2024Developed a system that automatically retrieves basin terrain and rainfall data for a national research institute.
• 2025Co-organized iRIC Forum 2025 in Obihiro. Adjunct lecturer at Hiroshima University. Presented at the Symposium on Computational Fluid Dynamics.
• 2026Fully renewed the iRIC web platform (iRIC ID, events, Academy). Hired our first full-time employees. Launched our own online Nays2DH and Nays2DFlood workshops. Moved our head office to Kugayama 4-chome, Suginami, Tokyo.