2001 Entrepreneur of the Year Award Finalist

Kevin Stewart
Molecular Opto Electronics Corp.

When it comes to the telecommunications industry, the race is on to find the fastest way to deliver information.
That search is critical in a field that supports the semiannual doubling of total data transmission capability worldwide.
Kevin Stewart founded his company, Molecular Opto Electronics Corp., with the goal of winning that race.
MOEC, based in Watervliet, develops and manufactures enabling components for ultrahigh-speed fiber optic installations that support converging data and multimedia services.
Stewart, president and CEO, says the company combines its expertise in optical waveguides and materials to form the technological basis for devices that are driving the optical networking revolution in communication. Such devices include attenuators, amplifiers and modulators.
Stewart worked for General Electric Co.’s Chemical/Bio Reactions Laboratory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was there that he and other materials scientists realized the best way to meet the massive information-carrying needs of the Internet was to pack it into nature’s best information carrier, a beam of light.
They determined the most efficient way to control that beam of light was to control the material in which it travels. This control of signal strength, bandwidth, is the technology that Stewart says sets MOEC apart from its few competitors.
Using this research, Stewart acquired a group of patents from GE pertaining to optoelectronic devices and applications, and in 1993 he founded his company. For the next seven years, MOEC remained in the research and development stage. By early 2000, the company was ready to bring its products to market.
Business has exploded out of the development phase to the manufacture of high-tech fiber optic components that integrate optics, materials, science and electronics. MOEC now churns out products that are sold to fiber optic telecommunications carriers, such as AT&T Corp., Sprint PCS and MCI/WorldCom Inc.
Now that MOEC has taken its products to market, growth is rapid. The employee base has expanded from 20 in 2000 to 120 at its Watervliet location. MOEC recently opened a second manufacturing facility in Mannington, W.Va., that enables the company to triple its production and spur even more growth.
Stewart says demand will increase for MOEC’s unique, patented technologies in the fiber optic control field. MOEC has formed strategic relationships with Lockheed Martin Corp. and Intel Capital for equity investments and acquisitions to grow the Internet economy.
The company’s growth will be further aided with the recent completion of $20 million in second-round financing by Lehman Brothers Venture Partners.

06/29/01 (C) Rochester Business Journal