contract-manufacturing
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The Firm That Bets on the Toolmakers, Not the Cure
For nearly four decades, Ampersand Capital Partners has skipped the lottery of drug discovery and quietly backed the companies that make the drug discovery possible. In May 2026 it closed a $1.5 billion fund in a single day.
The Medical-Food Company That Learned to Own the Last Mile
Alfasigma USA sits in the narrow lane between prescription medicine and everyday nutrition. Its advantage is not one miracle ingredient, but control of the route from formulation and factory floor to clinician and customer.
Inside the Company That Takes a Drug From Sketch to Syringe
Curia rarely puts its name on the medicine. It does the chemistry, scale-up and sterile manufacturing that can get somebody else’s molecule into a patient’s hands.
The quiet engineer keeping Takeda's medicine flowing
He does not develop the drug or run the ads. He makes sure the thing gets made, on spec, on time, batch after batch - across a network of factories Takeda does not own.
Matt Eiswerth Makes Biology Move
His career has crossed factories, consumer brands and a growth-stage company. At Novonesis, the common thread is the quiet discipline of turning plans into products customers can count on.
The Coffee Company You’ve Probably Drunk Without Knowing It
Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA sells famous coffee brands, but its more revealing product is the system behind them - a farm-to-shelf operation built for supermarkets, restaurants, offices and the people who never notice the name on the roasting plant.
The Snack Empire You've Eaten From and Never Heard Of
How a bankrupt pretzel maker bought for $72,100 in 1971 became the quiet $1.58 billion supplier behind the ICEE at the ballpark, the Dippin' Dots at the fair and the pretzel in the freezer aisle.
Perry's Ice Cream
The century-old New York brand is really three businesses in one: a hometown ice-cream label, a cold-chain network and a contract manufacturer built to make other companies look good.
Harvest Hill Beverage Company
Harvest Hill assembled a billion-dollar beverage business from brands many Americans first met in a lunchbox. Now, under a new owner, the company must prove that nostalgia can travel across aisles, formats and generations.
Interparfums, Inc.
Interparfums turns other people’s fashion names into a $1.49 billion fragrance business. Its advantage is an asset-light system that connects brand mythology, bottle design and a distribution network reaching more than 120 countries.
Christopher Leonor
From a high-school tungsten study to the quality desk of a global drugmaker, Christopher Leonor’s career is a study in the quiet systems that make pharmaceutical supply chains work.
YC Precision Fabrication
YC Precision Fabrication is a York, Pennsylvania precision sheet metal fabricator operating under the York Corrugating Company name since 1902. From a 125,000 sq. ft. facility, the roughly 11-employee (some directories list 100-249) contract shop runs MAZAK lasers and TRUMPF automatic punch presses with lights-out automation, offering laser cutting, CNC punching, press brake bending, shearing, welding, assembly and finishing to military, heavy equipment, automotive, elevator, HVAC and appliance customers under ISO 9001:2015 certification.
Velcro Companies
Velcro Companies is the maker of the original VELCRO Brand hook-and-loop fastener, invented by Swiss engineer George de Mestral after studying burrs under a microscope in the 1940s. From its U.S. base in Manchester, New Hampshire, the privately held firm designs and manufactures thousands of fastening variants - from basic fabric closures to injection-molded plastics, high-temperature retention systems and medical-grade straps - serving customers across medical, aerospace, automotive, military, industrial, footwear, packaging and consumer markets in roughly seven countries.
Planet Protector Group
Planet Protector Group is an Australian climate-materials company that turns waste wool and recycled fibre into circular insulation. Its flagship WOOLPACK product replaces polystyrene in cold-chain packaging for food, wine and pharmaceuticals, while a newer building-insulation line extends the same wool, denim and recycled-poly technology into construction. Founded in 2016 by Joanne Howarth, the company has diverted thousands of tonnes of waste wool from landfill, eliminated millions of polystyrene boxes and returned millions in new revenue to sheep farmers across Oceania.
Made Scientific
Made Scientific is a Princeton, New Jersey-based contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) focused exclusively on cell therapies. Formerly BioCentriq, it was rebranded in March 2025 and is backed by South Korea's GC Corporation. The company runs a 60,000 sq. ft. GMP facility with five ISO 7 / Grade B cleanrooms, offering process and analytical development, GMP manufacturing of autologous and allogeneic products, aseptic fill and finish, QC release testing, regulatory consulting, and workforce training, taking cell therapy programs from preclinical development through commercial supply.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Laser Wire Solutions
Laser Wire Solutions is a Welsh precision-engineering company that builds laser systems and robots to strip, cut and process the tiniest, most delicate wires on Earth - the kind found inside catheters, MRI coils, EV harnesses and spacecraft. Founded in 2011 by Oxford-trained physicist Paul Taylor, the Pontypridd firm turned a niche insight (that lasers strip fine wire more cleanly than blades) into award-winning machines and contract-manufacturing services now used by medical OEMs, aerospace and defense primes, data-center builders and even Tesla.
MacLean-Fogg
MacLean-Fogg is a fourth-generation, family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1925 that grew from a single railroad lock nut into a global maker of fasteners, engineered components, plastics, and additive-manufacturing tooling. Headquartered in Mundelein, Illinois, the roughly $1.2 billion-a-year enterprise supplies the automotive, heavy-truck, electric utility, telecom, and industrial markets from dozens of plants across North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2025 it marked its 100th anniversary still owned and led by the MacLean family.
HebeCell Corp
HebeCell Corp is a Natick, Massachusetts biotech developing allogeneic, off-the-shelf cell therapies grown from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Its core invention is a suspension-bioreactor platform, ProtoNK, that produces natural killer (NK) cells indefinitely and at scale - a manufacturing approach the company says no other lab can match. Founded in 2016, HebeCell aims to make cancer and degenerative-disease therapies cheaper, safer, and available without a matched donor, under the tagline 'Incurable no more.'
Nventric, Inc.
Nventric, Inc. is a medical device company and contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) headquartered in Arcadia, California, with operations in Seoul, South Korea. Founded in 2019 by engineers with backgrounds at Abbott Vascular and Johnson & Johnson, Nventric designs and builds minimally invasive vascular devices - covering neurovascular, coronary, and electrophysiology applications - from concept through scalable, ISO 13485-certified manufacturing. Its own-branded neurovascular line, including the ULTRIVA stent retriever and EVOGLIDE distal access catheter, targets acute ischemic stroke, while its OEM/CDMO services help device companies move products from prototype to commercialization.
Seurat Technologies
Seurat Technologies is a Massachusetts-based contract metal manufacturer built around Area Printing, a laser powder bed fusion process invented at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Instead of melting metal powder one point at a time, Seurat uses millions of tiny laser points to print entire areas at once, decoupling resolution from speed. The company doesn't sell printers; it runs its own clean-energy print factories and sells finished parts at costs meant to rival casting, forging, and machining, with the goal of reshoring high-volume metal manufacturing and cutting its carbon footprint.
Solarbiotech
Solarbiotech is a U.S.-based synthetic biology and biomanufacturing company that helps companies move precision-fermentation products from lab bench to commercial scale. Built around a Norton, Virginia plant with fermentation capacity from 6L to 10,000L and a modular 'BioNodes' architecture, it offers end-to-end strain-to-shelf services - upstream fermentation, downstream processing, and commercial production - for food ingredients, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, enzymes, and industrial bioproducts. After a 2024 Chapter 11 restructuring, its assets were acquired by Pictor Biotech (led by ex-Novozymes executive Peter Rosholm) and unified in January 2025 with GPC Bio and Eleszto Genetika into a vertically integrated, 100+ person SynBio platform.
Sungwoo Min
Sungwoo Min is the founder and CEO of Nventric, Inc., an Arcadia, California medical device company that designs, develops, and contract-manufactures vascular devices for the neurovascular, electrophysiology, and coronary markets. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who cut his teeth on R&D and marketing at Abbott Vascular and later led R&D programs at Johnson & Johnson, he started Nventric in 2019 to build the kind of life-saving catheters, stents, and thrombectomy systems he used to ship at the giants - this time end to end, ISO 13485 certified, with operations in the US and South Korea. He is a named inventor on multiple US patents for mechanical thrombectomy devices.