“This is just the place that we want to be,” said Ascential President Scott Watts.
“This is a great location,’ said Peter Oberst, an Applications Engineer for Ascential. “We’re up in the North Metro.”
Ascential is the newest business to pop up along the I-35W corridor in Blaine.
Ascential specializes in engineering and simulation services along with producing medical devices.
“We make automation in the medical and life sciences space,” Watts said. “What that means primarily is that we’re producing high volume consumables, like lateral flow test strips that were used in COVID tests. We make the automation for our customers that makes these products at high speed, high volume.”
“We start with napkin sketches and we end up with a living, breathing machine,” Oberst said. “These are used in medical life sciences and to improve people’s lives. That’s what we do here and we take that seriously.”
“Tremendous technical labor pool”
There will be over 100 employees working at Ascential’s spacious facility. Approximately half of them are in engineering and the other half are technicians.
Said Watts: “We’re a great employer.”
“The biggest thing that we have going for us here is the people who work for us,” Oberst said. “They’re very creative. They’re very hard-working. Very intelligent.”
Being in Blaine is a huge positive for Ascential.
“The base of people that we can draw from here is fantastic,” Watts said…”It’s where our employee base has always been. Tremendous technical labor pool here. Very smart, hard-working people in this area.”
Ascential benefits from being able to work with Boston Scientific, Medtronic, 3M and other Twin Cities businesses.
Blaine is part of Minnesota’s growing med-tech hub. When it comes to the medical profession, the North Star State is one of the top spots in the USA.
“If you put dots on the map it would be the northeastern United States, California, Minneapolis-St. Paul,” Oberst said. “Absolutely.”
