Sometimes a company — especially a quick-growing startup — outgrows its space and needs to find a new spot to scale. That's what happened recently with Albuquerque's BioFlyte.
The startup announced Thursday that it's set up operations at a new, 5,300-square-foot corporate facility at the Sandia Science and Technology Park. BioFlyte wants to use that new facility to ramp up its manufacturing and engineering operations, CEO Todd Sickles told Albuquerque Business First.
BioFlyte previously ran operations out of The Bioscience Center in Albuquerque, an incubator with laboratories and offices for bioscience companies. This new facility will give BioFlyte nearly three times as much space to handle manufacturing, engineering and research and development.
"Now that the firm has matured, we need more space dedicated for lab and testing areas," Sickles said. "We've created a completely separate manufacturing organization so that engineering can do product development and manufacturing can do manufacturing."
While BioFlyte is currently utilizing the facility, he said that it won't be "comfortably operational" until May. The company moved into the spot a couple of weeks ago.
Alongside offices, manufacturing and engineering, the facility will also feature a demonstration space where potential customers can visit to see the company's technology in action, Sickles said. That technology is a mass spectrometry-based sensor used for bio-threat surveillance, he said. It works by autonomously sampling air to detect and identify airborne threats, according to BioFlyte's website.
Sickles said the startup hopes to use its bioaerosol threat identifier products to protect "critical infrastructure," a category that includes mail facilities and airports, as well as cargo processing and arenas and sports venues.
The demand for the sort of biological threat detection technology that BioFlyte is commercializing has grown steadily, Sickles said, and he envisions the company expanding over the next few years as it ramps up manufacturing and engineering efforts.
"I'd much rather have very strong demand with headaches being around how we meet that demand, rather than lots of product on the shelves and us not knowing how we're going to move it and monetize it," he said.
To help ramp up those manufacturing efforts, BioFlyte appointed Bill Rule as the company's vice president of manufacturing. He'll oversee the startup's manufacturing operations and manage its supply chain model, according to a March 16 news release.
Rule joins the Albuquerque company from Everactive, an internet of things company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. He also managed his own supply chain and manufacturing engineering consultancy, according to the release.
"Cultural change is part of our focus," Rule told Business First. "It's transitioning from a development mindset to becoming a legitimate company in our eyes and our customers' eyes."
BioFlyte's move to a larger corporate facility comes almost a year after the company named Sickles as its new CEO. Alongside bringing on Rule to head up manufacturing operations, Sickles said that the company plans to hire a manufacturing engineer, purchasing support and sales and marketing employees over the next few months.
"The company will probably grow in terms of resources by about 50% this year," Sickles said, referring to the company's full-time employee count. "And if you look at the end of 2024, we should be about double our resource pool from today."
He didn't disclose potential salaries for those new positions but said the company intends to pay "competitive compensation" and offer stock options. BioFlyte currently has several job openings listed on its website.
BioFlyte was founded in 2020 as a spin-off of Zeteo Tech, a Maryland-based biodefense and medical device company. It brought in one of New Mexico's largest funding rounds last year with a $6 million raise in April following a $1.25 million seed round in 2020.
