CiDRA Corp.
50 Barnes Park North
Wallingford, CT

CiDRA is a venture capital backed, industrial process optimization company that was launched in May of 1997. The founding investor was Connecticut Innovations and the company initially targeted the oil and gas industry with the vision of equipping operating oil wells with downhole fiber optic sensors. Ninety percent of the operating oil and gas wells in the world did not have real-time sensing in place at the time and the unmet opportunity was to displace conventional "wireline" measurements with permanent fiber optic instrumentation that leveraged fiber optic technology that originated with the United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in the area of defense-related technology. CiDRA is a classic story of taking proven technology from the defense industry to industrial applications.

In 1997, Connecticut's economy was primarily either insurance-related, or defense/industrial-related, with both General Electric and UTC having their headquarters in Connecticut. UTC was Connecticut's largest employer at the time. CiDRA was able to leverage the transition from pure defense-related industries to other industries by being able to recruit and hire top-notch engineering talent from within Connecticut. Connecticut has strong aerospace engineering capabilities and these engineers represented a perfect talent pool from which to launch CiDRA. CiDRA also recruited heavily from the Naval Reseach Laboratories, which were technology leaders in the area of fiber optics. Additionally, these labs issued a license to CiDRA to exploit their novel fiber optic technology in nondefense-related industries.

CiDRA is growing its revenues by approximately 50 percent a year and has spun off several businesses in the local economy. In Wallingford alone, CiDRA has five businesses that it launched that are all growing and creating jobs in Connecticut:

• CiDRA Industrial Process Optimization: Focusing on mining and oil sands process optimization – 100 jobs in ConnecticutCiDRA Precision Services: Precision machining company sold to CiDRA employees – 22 jobs in Connecticut
• Expro Meters: Former oil and gas business unit of CiDRA sold to Expro Group of Aberdeen, Scotland – 26 jobs in Connecticut
• Weatherford Fiber Optic Sensing: Former oil and gas business unit of CiDRA sold to Weatherford, of Houston, Texas – 42 jobs in Connecticut
• CyVek: Recent startup in the area of proteomics instrumentation – Nine employees, also funded by Connecticut Innovations.

This list does not include CyVera, which was a biotech instrumentation company that CiDRA launched. It was sold to the leader in gene sequencing, Illumina of San Diego. CyVera was Connecticut based but was moved to San Diego to integrate into Illumina's operations. This represented approximately 15 jobs that were moved to San Diego.

CiDRA delivers sensing and control systems that help optimize the oil sands, hard rock mining, pulp and paper, agro processing and concrete processing industries. Delivering efficiency to these energy intense processes is vitally important, as it helps reduce energy consumption, increases plant productivity and increases throughput. CiDRA has the opportunity in some areas to deliver between two and five percent throughput increases in some of the largest industrial operations in the world. CiDRA has 350 customers in 29 countries.

CiDRA has benefited from R&D tax credits as well as the original license of defense generated technologies to launch the company. Connecticut Innovations has been a long-standing partner with CiDRA for over fourteen years as the company has created high value jobs in Connecticut. 

www.cidra.com