Medical manufacturer Biometrics adds 80 jobs in ongoing expansion

More than three years after being merged into a Salt Lake City-based company, a Monroe medical components manufacturer has added 80 jobs in the past year as it readies for another expansion with a new research and development facility.

Biomerics makes catheters and related components and other medical devices on an outsourced basis for other major medical device manufacturers. The company was founded in 1994 and merged in 2019 with Monroe-based Northeast Laser & Electropolish.

At the time, NLE had been in business more than 25 years under cofounders Rich Rosselli and Kurt England, who were both on hand Friday at a ceremony attended by Gov. Ned Lamont to commemorate the Biomeric expansion on Main Street, into space formerly occupied by Veracious Brewing.

Speaking Friday, Lamont said Biomerics is “on the front line of health care” contributing to the devices that save lives every day in hospitals and clinics in the United States and globally.

“Connecticut was the Silicon Valley of manufacturing going back many, many years,” Lamont said Friday in Monroe. “Companies like [Biomerics] remind me that we are turning things around.”

Rosselli said the company took the Biomerics merger offer in 2019 as customers began questioning its ability to add manufacturing capacity on short notice to help them meet demand. Today Biomerics lists Monroe as the headquarters of its micro-metal processing business which includes facilities in California, Minnesota and Costa Rica.

“We couldn’t go out and buy seven new machines in a year,” Rosselli said. “Our customers were saying, ‘what if this product really takes off ?’ ”

The state of Connecticut had loaned NLE $700,000 in 2015 to help underwrite the cost of a $1.9 million expansion that pushed the company’s workforce at the time to more than 100 people, with $200,000 of that amount forgiven according to Department of Economic and Community Development records.

With sales at $20 million in 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rosselli said revenue shot to $35 million the following year and $58 million last year. The new expansion pushes Biomerics’ Monroe plant to more than 60,000 square feet of space.

Rosselli said that while the company has seen turnover amounting to less than 10 percent of its workforce, it has been able to grow through new hiring.

“We did that in a time where people were looking everywhere for jobs,” Rosselli said. “It’s awfully hard to find new people.”