$20M grants
Economic Development Act grant the Los Alamos firm received is third-largest award in past year
Pebble Labs gets funds to improve antibioticand pesticide-free food.
WLOS ALAMOS ith the backing of nearly $20 million in state and Los Alamos County funding, Pebble Labs plans to triple its manpower and add five buildings to its Los Alamos campus in a quest to feed the planet with antibioticand pesticide-free food.
In the process, the company expects to grow from 83 employees to as many as 230 full-timers in the coming years.
The company plans to add 28 employees by early 2020 and reach 125 employees by the middle of next year, said Ron Deutsch, chief people officer at Pebble Labs.
Pebble Labs, established in August 2016 as a Los Alamos National Laboratory spinoff company, manages research on food and crop safety, public health and reducing disease, including
the Zika virus.
The promised job growth led to a $4 million Local Economic Development Act grant from the New Mexico Economic Development Department, which was announced Tuesday at the New Mexico Consortium Biological Laboratory campus in a ceremony attended by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
“This company creates sustainable food for 10 billion people,” Lujan Grisham said Tuesday. “We’re clear — we want local economic development resources to be available for companies to expand.”
The Pebble Labs grant will be the thirdlargest Economic Development Act grant in the past year, behind the $10 million awarded to Netflix and the $7.7 million for NBCUniversal Media, according to the state Economic Development Department.
Local Economic Development Act grants are awarded to local governments, typically in rural and underserved areas, that then assign them to companies that create jobs, increase wages and make significant capital investments.
Economic Development Secretary Alicia Keyes said Pebble also qualifies for up to $3.25 million in employee training money from the state Job Training Incentive Program.
Pebble Labs will start its expansion by closing on the purchase of an undisclosed amount of the New Mexico Consortium Biological Laboratory, where the company was founded by chief science officer Richard Sayre while he still worked for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Pebble now occupies nearly the entire 26,000-square-foot consortium building.
The consortium will use the funds from the sale to build a new facility at the Los Alamos Research Park.
Pebble Labs will then start its 10-year, $60 million construction with the first two new buildings on 6.3 acres of adjacent land valued at
$1.4 million and donated to the company by Los Alamos County.
The county also is assisting with issuing a $12.5 million industrial revenue bond for the project.
Pebble expects to break ground in spring 2020 on a 75,000-squarefoot laboratory and greenhouse for likely use by its crop and agriculture science division, called IronLeaf. A second 24,000-squarefoot building also will start construction next year and will house conference facilities, plus a cafeteria, day care center, gym and a lounge, said Paul Laur, Pebble Labs’ director of corporate development.
In all, Pebble Labs will add five buildings with a combined 200,000 square feet over the next 10 years, Laur said.
Sayre, the company’s founder, used the governor’s attendance to announce Pebble’s MermaidBio division has been able to solve a viral problem affecting farm-raised shrimp, an issue that Sayre said had not been controlled until now.
“We think we have achieved a solution for the shrimp industry,” he said.
He said more than half of Pebble Labs’ employees are women and one-third of its workers are from New Mexico.
The governor said that even in a state with limited resources, companies in New Mexico, including Pebble Labs, produce world-class research.
“New Mexico can do anything if you just have a vision of what you can accomplish,” Lujan Grisham said. “New Mexico just needs more and more of that.”