Mikros Technologies’ engineering team (Courtesy of Mikros Technologies)
For more than 30 years, Mikros Technologies has been quietly growing in the Upper Valley. Now the company that engineers and manufactures liquid cooling solutions for thermal management is set for its next stage of growth after being acquired by Jabil Inc. on Oct. 1.
Jabil is a publicly traded engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain solutions company in Florida. Jabil was the contract manufacturer for one of Mikros’ largest clients.
The acquisition is good news for Claremont-based Mikros Technologies and its 60 employees. While Drew Matter, president and CEO of Mikros Technologies, could not disclose the financial terms of the deal, Mikros’s employees did reap the rewards. “This is a great joy for us as we were able to share part of the proceeds from the sale with our employees to thank them for all the work they did over the years. It was life changing for some of them,” Matter says.
And while many acquisitions often lead to layoffs, the opposite holds true for Mikros. Matter says the acquisition will allow the company to scale. “We will grow around the world but not at the cost of local jobs,” Matter says. “We will be growing both our manufacturing and engineering capabilities. We’re going to be hiring a lot of skilled machinists, CNC and lathe operators, and skilled technicians,” as well as electrical, mechanical and manufacturing engineers. “Our quality assurance staff will need to grow as we scale,” he adds.
Matter conservatively estimates Mikros will need to grow its workforce to more than 100 employees in 2025. He stresses the company wants workers who align with Mikros’s core values—thinking big, being an expert, solving problems efficiently, acting with integrity and honor, and being thorough without compromising. “We need high integrity workers, not just highly skilled workers,” he says.
Hillary Halleck, director of people and culture at Mikros Technologies, says as the company grows, it will be careful to keep its culture intact as Jabil values “the culture as much as we do, We are closely aligned in culture.”
Mikros was founded in 1991 by Dr. Javier Valenzuela to commercialize micro-EDM technology developed under an SBIR project for NASA Johnson Space Center. As data centers, LEDs, electric vehicles, thermoelectric and other tech has become ubiquitous, the need to cool these products has also grown. By 2000, the company moved from Lebanon to its campus in Claremont.
The growth in data centers continues to create opportunities for Mikros Technologies and its liquid cooling offerings, Matter says. Mikros’s proprietary microchannel cold plate designs cool over one kilowatt per square centimeter.
Jabil sees the acquisition as a way to help its customers manage the intense thermal requirements of their products as, according to Jabil, liquid cooling has emerged as a more energy-efficient alternative to air cooling. Jabil has more than 140,000 employees and generated $28.9 billion in revenue in FY 2024. It has more than 100 sites globally and more than 40 million square feet of manufacturing space.
“We are thrilled to welcome Mikros Technologies to the Jabil team,” says Ed Bailey, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Jabil. “The thermal management capabilities they bring will allow Jabil to extend the range of services we provide to cloud service providers, hardware OEMs, and liquid cooling solutions providers.”
“In addition to the data center ecosystem, we see significant opportunities in other end-markets that require thermal management, including automated test equipment for semiconductors, batteries, energy storage systems, and electric vehicles,” Bailey adds.