Nanotronics, a science technology company, opened its flagship manufacturing center at Building 20, a 150-year-old former shipbuilding factory at Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York.

The company will use the new 45,000-square-foot building as its headquarters. The new factory will house many aspects of the company’s business, from research and development to production and design, while ensuring quality and safety through its proprietary platform, Intelligent Factory Control.

“We wanted to create a modern-day Edison Lab,” said Matthew Putman, CEO and cofounder of Nanotronics. “That vision of building in a way that was never done before, with the same hope and possibilities of better jobs, local products, and leading the world in invention seemed like a real possibility in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We are thrilled to advance manufacturing with the perspective of seeing our past, looking out of our windows at the city where so much of our present is on view, and build an intelligent factory where robotics, AI, and humans can work together to create a sustainable future.”

The project was primarily funded through $3.25 million from the City of New York and a $2.25 million Regional Economic Development Council capital grant through Empire State Development in exchange for a commitment of 190 jobs.

“The Navy Yard is quickly becoming a national model for bringing sustainable manufacturing jobs back to cities, and companies like Nanotronics are leading that charge,” said David Ehrenberg, President & CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. “Nanotronics is the perfect example of the type of innovative, vertically-integrated manufacturer that can grow and thrive at the Yard, exemplifying a new model of urban manufacturing and creating high-quality, middle class jobs.”

The opening of Building 20 comes as the Navy Yard is undergoing its largest expansion since World War II, which will increase the Yard’s job total from 12,000 to 20,000 in the coming years. The expansion includes the $187 million renovation of Building 77 to provide space to vertically integrated design and manufacturing companies and the ground-floor Food Manufacturing Market; the Green Manufacturing Center, which houses New Lab, Crye Precision, and an expanded Steiner Studios, the largest film and television production studio outside Hollywood in the United States. BNYDC also recently announced a $2.5 billion master plan to create 10,000 additional jobs housed in vertical manufacturing buildings, which would bring the total number of jobs at the Yard to 30,000 in the coming decades.

“The Brooklyn Navy Yard has a history of serving New Yorkers in times of crisis, and it proved its worth once again at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, it has an important role to play in our city’s recovery, by building a sustainable and high-tech manufacturing base in the heart of New York City,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “From creating hundreds of jobs to nurturing the next generation of STEM talent, Nanotronics and the Navy Yard are helping build a recovery for all of us, and I’m proud to support their extraordinary efforts.”

Nanotronics' artificial intelligence researchers, computer scientists, chemists and physicists will be able to work directly with skilled machinists on the manufacturing floor, developing innovations that will lead partner industries to a smaller factory footprint, less waste and a faster route from R&D to production.