As defense and aerospace manufacturers rapidly scale composite production to meet historic demand, conventional quality control methods like subjective water-break tests are creating critical manufacturing bottlenecks. Brighton Science is eliminating this variability by bringing quantitative material science directly onto the shop floor. Following its acquisition by Click Bond, Inc. in January 2026, the company continues to operate independently as “Brighton Science, a Click Bond company,” combining non-destructive contact-angle measurement devices with BConnect – its AI-powered SaaS analytics platform.
A brief description of the company and its activities.
Brighton Science is the global leader in Surface Intelligence — the application of materials science to real-world adhesion, bonding, coating, and manufacturing challenges. The company provides specialized consulting and laboratory testing focused on surfaces, surface preparation, bonding and coating processes, and the interfaces where adhesion succeeds or fails, using techniques such as XPS, FTIR, contact angle measurement, and fracture analysis. Brighton Science, formerly BTG Labs, has developed a versatile Surface Analyst technology suite widely used in the aerospace, automotive, electronic, medical device, and consumer product industries. Based in Cincinnati, Ohio, Brighton Science was acquired by Click Bond, Inc. in January 2026 and continues to operate independently as “Brighton Science, a Click Bond company.”
What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Brighton Science operates across three main areas:
(1) instrumentation — handheld and automated contact-angle devices for surface inspection on the factory floor;
(2) BConnect, its networked SaaS platform for surface data collection, analytics, and remote monitoring;
(3) Professional consulting services using advanced lab techniques like XPS and FTIR. It serves the aerospace, automotive, medical device, electronics, and consumer goods sectors.
What’s the news about new products/services?
The biggest news is the January 2026 acquisition by Click Bond, a global leader in adhesive-bonded fastening and assembly solutions, which expands Click Bond’s ability to deliver measurable, scientific confidence from surface to structure. On the product side, Brighton Science launched BCCoach in October 2025 — an AI-powered chat assistant built into BConnect, powered by large language models and Brighton’s proprietary knowledge base, letting users ask natural-language questions and get contextual, role-specific answers. Alongside it came BCWeatherman, a BConnect add-on that automatically captures ambient temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure at the moment an instrument reading is taken, tying environmental context to surface data. BConnect has also just crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue, now supporting more than 3,000 users across 26 industries and 5+ countries, with 316,000+ measurements through 76 connected networks and 102 deployed instruments — including its busiest month ever in March 2026, with 23,000+ measurements in a single month.
What are the ranges of products/services?
Non-networked instruments: Handheld Surface Analyst, Automated Surface Analyst, and instruments for MRO/sustainment work;
Networked solutions (BConnect platform): Process Monitor and Lab Network, plus add-ons including BCCoach (AI assistant), BCWeatherman (environmental sensing), and the Silicone Detection Protocol – which uses witness trays and contact-angle measurement to catch airborne silicone contamination before it compromises bonding, coating, or sealing;
Professional services: Consulting and lab testing using XPS, FTIR, contact angle measurement, and fracture analysis;
Training: Brighton Academy, the company’s learning platform for surface science education.
What is the state of the market where you are currently active?
The surface-intelligence and adhesion-measurement market is being pulled forward by a real supply-side crunch: aerospace and defense manufacturers are ramping composites production at a pace the industry is calling “built to scale.” Industry coverage this year has centered on high-rate and scalable manufacturing for defense composites, with material suppliers building multisite redundancy to meet growing military demand, and rising defense demand tied to global conflicts pushing primes and suppliers to industrialize processes that used to run at much lower rates. Every one of those composite bonds depends on verified surface readiness — squarely Brighton Science’s territory. The sector is also seeing consolidation and reshoring, including composites capacity being brought onto U.S. soil specifically for direct aerospace and defense customer access, and major OEMs like GE Aerospace committing billions to U.S. manufacturing growth.
What can you tell us about market trends?
A few trends stand out. First, manufacturers are moving away from subjective, lab-only quality checks (like traditional water-break tests) toward real-time, connected data platforms with visibility across facilities and supply chains. Second, AI is becoming embedded directly into industrial software rather than existing as a separate tool — BCCoach is a good example. Third, and biggest structurally: the composites ramp-up in aerospace and defense means manufacturers moving from low-rate, hand-built structures to high-rate, repeatable production can no longer rely on subjective bond-readiness checks — the tolerance for variability shrinks as volume goes up, accelerating demand for quantifiable surface data. That’s also driving convergence between bonding science and fastening engineering commercially, which is part of why Click Bond and Brighton Science are now under one roof.
What are the most innovative products/services marketed?
BConnect is the flagship innovation — introduced as the world’s first Surface Intelligence platform, and extended with BCCoach (AI-guided decision support) and BCWeatherman (environmental context). The Silicone Detection Protocol is another standout: it takes a diagnostic technique Brighton’s consultants have used for years in the field to find the root cause of adhesion failures, and turns it into a continuously running, automated alert system inside Process Monitor — a good example of the company’s pattern of productizing hard-won consulting expertise. On the hardware side, the Surface Analyst family remains the only device designed to measure contact angle on the factory floor, fully handheld and untethered, with a patented measurement method for non-planar, textured, or non-horizontal surfaces.
What estimations do you have for the second half of 2026?
We expect continued growth in defense and aerospace sales through the second half of 2026, driven by the industry-wide ramp-up in composites production. As primes and suppliers push to scale composite manufacturing at higher rates, the tolerance for bond-quality variability shrinks — which is fueling demand for the kind of real-time, quantifiable surface data BConnect and the Surface Analyst platform provide. We anticipate this translating into deeper adoption across defense programs specifically, alongside continued integration with Click Bond’s fastening and assembly business, positioning Brighton Science to support manufacturers as they scale composite bonding processes without sacrificing reliability.
