Clear Align of Eagleville uses brainpower to make gains in optics work

Eagleville, Montgomery-county based Clear Align was ranked late last year as the third-fastest growing company in Greater Philadelphia and the 128th-fastest growing company on the continent. The company, which designs, prototypes and manufactures custom electro-optic products, boasts an annual compounded growth of 128 percent over the last five years. Much of that can be attributed to Clear Align’s Reliable-Engineering-Design-Implementation (REDI) Platform, a new engineering development architecture for fast-turn defense-grade products.

The rest can be credited to simply blowing its customers’ minds.

“We’ve taken on some programs people said couldn’t be done because of the laws of physics and disproved them,” says Clear Align founder, president and CEO, Angelique X. Irvin. “That impacts your reputation.”

Those customers, including defense behemouths Lockheed Martin, Honeywell and Raytheon, are increasingly benefitting from Irvin’s commitment to her staff, made up of many former colleagues at Bell Laboratories. Irvin says without a hint of doubt that one-third of her staff has an IQ over 120. Still, she spends a significant amount on training for employees, and the company kitchen even has a compost bin.

Clear Align builds intelligent surveillance equipment, and examples of its custom products include infrared, visible and hyperspectral imaging systems; acoustic sensor systems; and laser and switching solutions and system development for fiber optics. The company, which has also delved into devices that detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs), has more than 50 employees, and Irvin expects that number to double in the next two years.

“I’m just trying to manage that growth rate and make sure we hit all our targets,” says Irvin, who founded the company in 2003 around a Lockheed project. “The things we do determine whether people live or die in the world.”

Source: Angelique X. Irvin, Clear Align
Writer: Joe Petrucci