Perbix, a Brooklyn Park-based maker of automated factory equipment, is being bought by electronic car company, Tesla.
The Twin Cities robotics company has supplied custom machinery to Tesla facilities for three years. Tesla said that it plans to keep Perbix in Brooklyn Park, and use its resources to continue expanding Tesla's automated manufacturing and battery plants in California and Nevada. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In 2014, Perbix signed a lease on a new 70,000 square-foot facility along Highway 610. The project was estimated to have cost about $6.4 million, and moved the company out of Golden Valley, where it was founded.
Perbix marked 40 years in the Twin Cities in 2016. The company was started in 1976 as a maker of assembling equipment and machine parts.After the company was sold to its current owner, Jim Dudley, in 2001, Perbix switched its focus to creating custom parts for factory automation. The business currently employs 150 people, but Tesla said that it plans to recruit more.
This isn't Tesla's first manufacturing acquisition. In recent years, it also scooped up a Michigan parts stamping plant in 2015 and a German engineering firm in 2016.
