Fast-growing Ingenicomm aims for the stars

Ingenicomm can legitimately say business is out of this world.

Products developed by the Chantilly-based company are used by NASA, the International Space Station, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and Canadian Space Agency.

“Targeting the international market is a natural for our company,” says Amit Puri, the company’s president and CEO.

The company’s programmable telemetry processor (PTP), for example, is designed to process spacecraft telemetry. A spacecraft sends collected data to operators on the ground with information that includes the status of the spacecraft as well as scientific data gathered by its instruments.

“It’s an extraordinarily flexible product,” Puri says of PTP. “The standard PTP contains more than 200 different software modules that perform different types of processing for spacecraft data. Users can select and configure individual modules as they need for their unique mission needs.”

Puri and three colleagues started the business in 2010 after working at companies that worked with international and domestic space agencies.

“My first job out of college was as a ground-systems engineer at Avtec Systems, a small aerospace contractor located in Fairfax,” Puri says. “At the time, Avtec was a key supplier of data-processing equipment to NASA, and the job introduced me to the aerospace market.”

The market has been good for Ingenicomm. It ranked No. 8 on the 2016 Fantastic 50, an annual list of the fastest-growing small companies in Virginia. The company recorded a revenue growth rate of 692.5 percent from 2011 to 2014.

Ingenicomm has 40 employees, about half of whom work in Chantilly and an office in Greenbelt, Md. The other employees are located in White Sands, N.M., supporting the NASA facility there.

Ingenicomm supports a significant portion of the scientific and exploratory spacecraft operated by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

The company also works with a variety of domestic defense and intelligence programs. Ingenicomm-developed equipment is used to support critical early warning and missile detection systems such as the Space-Based Space Surveillance and Space-Based Infrared system operated by the U.S. Air Force.

Puri is pleased with the support the company has received from the commonwealth in developing international markets.

“It’s clear that Virginia is deeply interested in expanding its export footprint in the global marketplace and is prepared to offer practical assistance and not just encouraging words,” he says. “This makes it an ideal location from which to run a global business such as ours.”