Forge Bellwater, the Foundry Row startup incubator, is adding a second floor of office and lab space after reaching full capacity, executive director Nadia Osei said this week, nearly doubling the converted warehouse's footprint.
Forge Bellwater, the Foundry Row startup incubator housed in a converted warehouse, is adding a second floor of office and lab space after reaching full capacity with its current roster of tenants, executive director Nadia Osei announced this week. The expansion will add roughly 20,000 square feet, nearly doubling the incubator’s footprint.
“We have had a waiting list for bench space for the better part of a year,” Osei said. “That is a good problem for an incubator to have, but it is still a problem, because every month we can’t offer someone space is a month a startup might decide to look somewhere else.”
Demand outpacing space
Osei said the incubator currently houses 22 companies, ranging from early-stage biotech spinouts to green-energy hardware startups, and has turned away at least eight applicants over the past year for lack of space. Among the incubator’s current tenants is Halcyon Biotherapeutics, the newly formed Kincaid University spinout that recently closed its own seed funding round, whose growth Osei cited as one driver of the space crunch.
“When a tenant goes from three people to twelve in under a year, that is exactly the outcome we want,” Osei said. “It also means we suddenly have three fewer open benches than we planned on.”
An incubator that never has to expand is an incubator that isn’t doing its job. The trick is expanding fast enough that we don’t lose the tenants we most want to keep in the meantime.
Nadia Osei, Executive Director, Forge Bellwater
A neighborhood feeling the same pressure
The expansion adds to a broader pattern of space constraints across Foundry Row’s biotech and green-energy cluster, one also facing larger tenants like Kestrel Biologics, which is separately scouting sites for its own second manufacturing facility after outgrowing its space in the same building complex.
Osei said the second-floor buildout is being financed through a combination of the incubator’s own reserves, a state economic-development grant and a below-market loan from a community development lender, and is expected to be complete within eight months. She said rents for the new space will be set on the same sliding scale tied to a company’s stage and revenue that Forge Bellwater has used since it opened.
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said the incubator’s growth reflects the broader momentum in Foundry Row’s startup scene, momentum she said the chamber has tried to support through its quarterly employer meetings. “Every company that gets big enough to need its own building somewhere else started in a shared space like Forge Bellwater,” Nakamura said. “Keeping that shared space big enough matters more than people realize.”
Osei said the incubator plans to prioritize the new space for green-energy hardware startups, a category she said has grown faster than lab-space tenants over the past two years but has struggled to find appropriately zoned shared workspace elsewhere in the city. “Biotech tenants have other options opening up as more landlords convert old buildings,” she said. “Hardware startups that need a shop floor, not just a lab bench, have almost nowhere else to go.”
The expansion will not add new parking, a decision Osei acknowledged has drawn some complaints from current tenants but said was unavoidable given the building’s footprint. She said the incubator is exploring a shuttle partnership with a nearby transit stop to offset the shortfall.
“We looked at every version of this plan that included more parking,” Osei said. “Every one of them cost us square footage we needed for actual companies. We chose the companies.”
Osei said the incubator has also used the expansion planning process to reassess its tenant mix, adding a formal cap on how much of the new floor can go to any single company regardless of how fast that company is growing. “We learned from watching a couple of tenants nearly take over a floor that we need rules in place before we’re tempted to bend them for whoever is growing fastest that quarter,” she said.
Faircloth, the Kincaid University president, said the university has informally discussed helping fund a portion of the expansion in exchange for guaranteed space for future faculty spinouts, though Osei said no formal agreement has been reached. “We would welcome that conversation,” Osei said. “A guaranteed pipeline of serious, well-vetted spinouts is exactly the kind of tenant we want more of, not less.”
Nakamura said the chamber views the expansion as connected to the city’s broader efforts to retain graduates who might otherwise leave for startup hubs in larger cities. “Every square foot Forge Bellwater adds is another reason a Kincaid graduate doesn’t have to choose between staying near family and building a real company,” she said.