David Wichner When tech entrepreneur Matt Pobloske bought longtime Tucson optics firm Breault Research Organization about five years ago, the idea was to rejuvenate and grow the somewhat stagnant company.
A veteran of the unmanned aircraft and remote-sensing business, Pobloske was director of business development for Advanced Ceramics Research, which developed a line of semi-autonomous drone aircraft with the Navy in the 1990s. Military focusNew defense work has buoyed Breault, which was founded in 1979 by University of Arizona optics alumnus Bob Breault and worked on many Pentagon projects over the decades.
After some recent hirings, Breault has about 10 employees in Tucson, and AdaptiSense overall has about 30 including Biospherical Instruments’ operation in San Diego, Pobloske said. Bob Breault remains chairman emeritus of his namesake company and still comes to the office regularly, he added. Improving warheadsBreault recently completed work on a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research contract for an “Enhanced Lethality Warhead” awarded by the Office of Naval Research in June and is working on a proposal for a Phase II contract, which would include prototyping and proof-of-concept testing.
Breault has been working on heat-resistant landing lights under prior SBIR awards for the Navy since 2013, and the current work is under a $744,000 contract award in 2019. “Breault’s legacy customer list is unbelievable, especially on the software side — pick a fortune 1000 company and I will almost guarantee we sold them something,” he said.
“That application is really like limitless to anything that’s underwater, because you can imagine that any kind of optic or any kind of window where anything that’s underwater, sensors or anything, requires a clean surface,” he said.