HUDSON – One key to a successful startup is to find a market that is small enough to be overlooked but big enough to support growth. For Hudson’s Viaflo, now part of Swiss-based Integra Biosciences, that niche has proved to be a basic tool of laboratory work, the pipette.

“In 40 years, I have never seen the size of the market decline,” said CEO Gary Nelson, who can look back on many, many hours using pipettes to move material between petri dishes in a lab growing animal and human cells.

Pipettes are tiny tubes used by lab workers to draw up and release very small but very precisely measured amounts of liquid, often measured in microliters (millionths of a liter) or, in Nelson’s term, amounts as small as “one-200th of a raindrop.”

They are used in all types of medicine and life-science fields, from middle-school science labs to hospital testing labs to massive production facilities run by multinational “Big Pharma” corporations like Pfizer. In particular, the explosion in health-related research and development has fueled the need for pipettes.

“In labs nowadays, they can just throw stuff at a problem,” Nelson said. “Instead of limiting what is tested, they’ll say ‘I’m just going to test all million (possibilities) against my unknown and see which ones work.’?”

Those million possibilities are probably being moved around the lab in pipettes. Hence the market opportunities.

Integra Viaflo has 38 full-time employees in a 20,000-square-foot facility, where they do software development, assembly, some manufacturing, as well as sales and service.

Privately held, the company has annual sales in the “tens of millions” of dollars, much of it international because of the Integra connection, Nelson said. He said U.S. sales should grow “65 percent or so” this year, and noted that recurring revenue from service, upgrades and the like, makes up about 20 percent of business and is growing faster than revenue from product sales.

The classic lab pipette is a single-tube unit that is gripped and pointed down, sort of like a ski pole. The thumb at the top operates a manual control that draws up or releases liquid.

The Viaflo models are electric, with thumbwheel controls that look like escapees from an iPod and a tiny display screen. This allows for more precision than manual controls as well as a huge amount of options.

Other firms make electronic pipette tools, but Viaflo says its models, combined with a patented click-on method of attaching and removing disposable tips, do a better job of speeding up lab work and reducing carpel tunnel syndrome among what are sometimes referred to as “bench rats,” the grad students and technical staff who do the precision work behind life-science breakthroughs.

Viaflo also sells handheld models that hold eight or more pipettes at a time, and even a model that can adjust the spacing between pipettes on the fly, so they can be used with containers that have different spacings between the tiny “wells” that hold liquid.

Viaflo’s specialty has been this electronic handheld market since it launched several years ago. The company is moving into the tabletop market with Viaflo96, which can draw up or dispense material from 96 pipettes at a time in a variety of configurations. Rolled out in January, the device looks like a power tool that had been designed by Apple. Much of Viaflo’s design work is done by Farm Product Development of Hollis. Costing roughly $15,000, it is edging close to markets for bigger, more expensive models, including some sold by Integra.

The Viaflo96 is one of five finalists in the Product of the Year contest held by the New Hampshire High-Tech Council. The winner will be decided Nov. 14. This expansion might be considered the slightly delayed follow-through by Viaflo’s founders.

They came from Matrix, a Hudson firm that developed other devices for handling liquids in laboratory settings. That company sold out to Thermo Fisher Scientific, which still operates in a south Hudson industrial park. Three Matrix founders – Nelson, and Larry Keene and George Kalmakis of Massachusetts – eventually decided to start anew.

They joined with Greg Mathus of Massachusetts, John Stowell of Hollis and Avi Levy from Israel to form Viaflo with a big goal: To develop an entire line of new products from scratch and bring them out, all at once, in January 2008, less than two years after starting up.

“We found there’s a reason people don’t do that: It can’t be done,” said Nelson, laughing. “There was way too much to focus on.”

They brought out a partial product line but then faced the financial headwall of the recession. This led them to look for a partner, and Integra Bioscience filled the bill.

“They wanted presence in the U.S.,” Nelson said.

Integra was also the first investor in Matrix, Nelson said, adding a lesson that will ring true to entrepreneurs looking for connections: “That just shows, never burn those bridges.”

David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com.