Forge Bellwater has admitted 14 companies to its Foundry Row incubator, its largest cohort yet, executive director Nadia Osei said Monday, just as the incubator moves forward with a second-floor expansion to relieve a year-long space crunch.
Forge Bellwater has welcomed its largest class of new startups yet, admitting 14 companies to its Foundry Row incubator this cycle, up from eight in the previous cohort, executive director Nadia Osei said Monday. The new cohort arrives just as the incubator moves forward with a second-floor expansion meant to relieve a year-long waiting list for space.
“We could have admitted this cohort a year ago if we’d had the room,” Osei said. “The fact that we finally have somewhere to put fourteen companies instead of eight says as much about the expansion as it does about the applicant pool.”
A broader mix of industries
The new cohort includes six biotech and health-science startups, four green-energy hardware companies, and, notably, Forge Bellwater’s first artificial-intelligence-focused startup, along with three companies Osei described as still refining their core business model. Among the biotech admits is Halcyon Biotherapeutics, the Kincaid University spinout announced by the university’s technology-transfer office, whose founders unveiled the company’s formation earlier this year.
Osei said the growing share of green-energy hardware applicants reflects a shift in the kind of founders approaching the incubator, many of whom she said have prior experience at established manufacturers like Bellwater Turbine Works rather than purely academic backgrounds. “We used to get almost entirely lab-coat founders,” Osei said. “Now we’re getting people who spent a decade on a factory floor and think they know how to build something better.”
Fourteen companies in one cohort is the kind of number that used to make me nervous about whether we could actually support all of them. Now it makes me nervous about whether we have enough space, which is a much better problem.
Nadia Osei, Executive Director, Forge Bellwater
Not every startup will make it
Dr. Samuel Iyer, the Bellwater State University labor economist who studies the region’s startup ecosystem, cautioned that a larger cohort does not guarantee a larger number of surviving companies. “Incubator cohorts grow because the ecosystem is healthier, which is real progress,” Iyer said. “But the failure rate for early-stage startups doesn’t really change just because there are more of them in the room at once.”
Osei acknowledged the point, noting that Forge Bellwater’s historical rate of companies surviving to a second funding round or acquisition has held steady at roughly 40 percent across cohorts of varying sizes. “We are not trying to guarantee every company in this cohort survives,” she said. “We are trying to make sure the ones with real potential get the resources to find out.”
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said the size of the new cohort reflects growing confidence among founders that Bellwater’s startup infrastructure, including access to Kincaid’s research pipeline and the incubator’s mentorship network, can compete with larger cities. “Five years ago, a founder with real traction might have felt they had to move to build a company,” Nakamura said. “More of them are deciding they can build it here instead.”
Osei said the incubator has also expanded its mentorship program to accommodate the larger cohort, adding six new volunteer mentors drawn from Kestrel Biologics, Ridgeline Therapeutics and several Kincaid faculty members with startup experience. She said demand for mentorship slots has outpaced even the growth in physical space.
“You can build more square footage faster than you can build a bench of people willing to spend their evenings helping a first-time founder not make an obvious mistake,” Osei said. “That’s actually the harder capacity problem.”
Osei said the incubator’s first artificial-intelligence-focused startup, founded by a pair of recent Kincaid computer-science graduates, applies to a category of applicant Forge Bellwater has rarely seen before. “We built this incubator around lab benches and shop floors,” Osei said. “This is the first cohort where we had to think seriously about what a startup that mostly just needs desks and server access actually requires from us.”
The three companies Osei described as still refining their business model will receive an additional quarter of mentorship before the incubator decides whether to extend their residency, a probationary structure she said is new this cycle. “We used to let every admitted company just run for a full year regardless of traction,” she said. “That wasn’t fair to the companies that were ready to move faster, and it wasn’t honest with the ones that weren’t.”
Nakamura said the chamber has begun tracking Forge Bellwater’s cohort sizes as an informal barometer of the broader local economy’s health, noting that the incubator’s admissions had shrunk for two consecutive cycles several years ago during a slower period for outside investment. “Fourteen is the biggest number we’ve seen since I started paying attention to this,” she said. “It tells you something is working, even if it doesn’t tell you exactly what yet.”