On the other side of the Everett Turnpike from Merrimack Premium Outlets, across Daniel Webster Highway from the Budweiser Brewery, there is a 360,000-square-foot building where about 200 people work to create a piece of medical equipment the size of a small U-Haul truck. It’s used to test thousands of samples at once for coronavirus.

But few people have heard of the business, KMC Systems. While the company engineers and manufactures the equipment, the credit goes to the large laboratories that actually develop the tests.

And Derek Kane, vice president and general manager of KMC, wants to keep it that way.

He won’t disclose any of his large customers for fear he might be drawing attention away from the end user to the unsung equipment supplier.

“We are behind the scenes of a lot of that testing,” he said. “We are the unheard-of first responders.”

KMC — the K is for “Kollsman,” the avionics and tech company that was previously at the location — is a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, an Israeli-owned military contractor with $4.5 billion in revenue in 2019. KMC is a “standalone” subsidiary, said Kane, though it shares the same mission of “protecting lives.”

KMC’s business had been on the upswing even before the pandemic hit, since it makes all sorts of medical equipment for testing for multiple diseases, diagnostic imaging equipment, blood counting instruments and robots to detect bacterial suspension.

The company doesn’t figure out how to test for these things, but it does figure out how to do the testing cheaper and quicker.

“They come up with the agents, the fluids you combine with the sample, the petri dish. They develop the chemistry and biology, and we automate it at high speed,” said Kane.

Covid-19 has accelerated that growth. Since the pandemic, the company has added 40 new contractors and 25 fulltime employees to its staff. About half of the 200 employers are engineers who design the equipment, the other half production workers who make it.

It isn’t just testing devices that the company manufactures.

Through Elbit, KMC won a defense contract in August to evaluate a U.S. Navy ventilator to help treat patients infected by the virus.

But the main project is the creation and manufacture of a large and complex piece of diagnostic lab equipment to test for the virus. The equipment is 10 feet by 8 feet by 5 feet, and inside there are some 10,000 parts — 3,000 purchased from suppliers, mostly based in the United States. It takes about 250 hours to build one and another 100 hours to test. The company turns out about 40 a month, at prices ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 apiece. The result is a machine that can test as many as 1,200 samples at once — “the highest volume with that level of accuracy,” Kane said.

Given the need to get results back quickly during this traumatic second wave, Kane doesn’t mind that the credit goes to the customers spitting out results.

“We know we are making a difference,” he said. “We know we are saving lives.”