Please don't ask Terry Rufer if ColdEdge Technologies, his Allentown company and a maker of cryogenic equipment, has anything to do with Walt Disney's head. “Storage of stem cells, blood, pharmaceutical products – those are the real applications,” he says.
Rufer founded the company with four other cool dudes including Ajay Khatri, Jeff Romig and Eric Lecher in 2008 after having worked together in cryogenics since the 1990s.
He explains ColdEdge's product like this: what makes your home refrigerator cold is the little motor at the bottom; the part where you store the food is the “interface.” ColdEdge gets its motors, generating the frigid temperatures, from Sumitomo Heavy Industries Cryogenics Group – also in Allentown – and “we provide different interfaces to researchers, real scientists, all over the world.”
ColdEdge's supercold refrigerators approach absolute zero (-459 Fahrenheit or
-273 Centigrade) and are customized for specific materials research and development projects in fields including chemistry, medicine, physics and astronomy. Their customers are government and university laboratories and companies doing R&D.
Rufer reports that ColdEdge is growing at a robust 40-to-50 percent a year. With five full-time employees, he anticipates adding as many as three positions this year to provide manufacturing, engineering and clerical help.
Another measure of ColdEdge's growth has been its physical expansion at Allentown's Bridgeworks Enterprise Center. The company doubled its original space about a year and a half ago and is already outgrowing its quarters. Rufer anticipates another expansion in 2014.
Source: Terry Rufer, ColdEdge Technologies
Writer: Elise Vider