Business is booming
Defense contractor SI2 Technologies has found its niche
BILLERICA » In an unassuming office park off of Route 3A, wars are being fought and won.
SI2 Technologies, a local small business and defense contractor, is headquartered here, producing communications equipment for the United States military and larger prime contractors. SI2 recently completed a major site expansion, and earlier this month, won a $1 million award for a Shark Tankstyle pitch contest.
Founded in 2003, SI2 develops and manufactures antennas, arrays and signal management products, often using 3D printing technology in its designs.
However, these are not typical antennas like the rabbit ears on an old-fashioned television. Most of the products would not be recognizable as antennas to a layperson, with many shaped like flat plates or arranged into arrays that look more like a flexible mesh.
CEO Joseph Kunze explained that the company likes to focus on creating unique designs that incorporate flexibility, power and lightness while not breaking the bank.
“We don’t do commodity antennas. We take on challenges that have a major engineering component,” he said. “It’s always some new challenge.”
One of the ways that the company accomplishes this in its labs is with oneof-a-kind production machines, like a 3D printer the size of a truck that can form the metal antennas and communication systems directly onto other equipment, including curved and uneven surfaces.
When a product, such as the frame of a drone, is placed on the bed of this printer, the machine first scans it with a laser to map a digital representation of the surface, then prints electronic materials right onto that surface.
“We’re not putting a square peg in a round hole anymore,” Kunze said. “Very few things are flat or square. There’s wasted space there and we like to utilize that.”
Other machines in SI2’s labs include traditional 3D printers and a machine that prints on rolling flat, flexible surfaces, much like a traditional inkjet printer.
Early in October, SI2 entered the Weapons Pitch Day contest held by the Armament Directorate, part of the U.S. Air Force. The event gave SI2 and more than 200 other companies the chance to pitch their ideas, and as a finalist, SI2 won a $1 million contract to develop a multifunction radio frequency seeker system.
“A lot of the time with government contracting, you only know the people that win,” Kunze said. “This way, you get to see your competition.”
The big win isn’t the first good news the company has had in 2021, either. Earlier in the year, it completed a major expansion of its lab and office space, bringing the company up to 23,000 square feet.
The expansion was completed in two phases, starting with building out the existing office space and then expanding into another space within the office park. The new addition is actually a smaller space that the company originally occupied when it was first getting started, just across the parking lot from its main space.
Located in the new lab space is testing equipment that allows the company to do its own quality control. Kunze explained that in the early years of the company, they would spend time and money every year transporting prototypes around the country for testing.
Some of that testing includes subjecting prototypes to extreme temperatures or radio frequencies, much like might be experienced in real-world combat zones.
“If you don’t know the properties of it, how are you going to design it?” Kunze said.
Kunze said the expansion is not the end of SI2’s growth: part of its new space is a large conference room he expects will eventually be overtaken by lab space, and they have no intention of slowing down.
“We’re really pushing into growing the company and launching more products,” he said. “We love the research and development business, but we want to grow the company with more product opportunities and sales.”
Meanwhile, the company’s growth allows it to continue to push its culture of challenging each other. This goal is signified by SI2’s “Challenge Coin” program, inspired by the coins given out among the U.S. military branches for special accomplishments.
SI2 emulates this by giving each employee their own coins and using them as incentives and awards for employees who exemplify the company’s core values to boost camaraderie and morale.
Those goals also push the company to hire plenty of interns and entry-level engineers, helping develop the careers of the scientists they hope to see.
“It lets the employees understand that these are the things our customers value,” Kunze said.