To the far southwest of Santa Fe, near Santa Fe Country Club and Santa Fe Regional Airport, sits a large facility helping drive the City Different's startup scene.
Called the Santa Fe Business Incubator, it's a 501(c)(3) organization housed within a 30,000-square-foot campus at 3900 Paseo del Sol.
The City of Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce established the Incubator's original 10,000-square-foot campus in December 1997. It expanded to 30,000 square feet in 2002.
There are 16 companies and organizations working with the Incubator currently, per the Incubator's website. Those include some fast-growing startups, like Mercury Bio, a recent New Mexico Inno Startup to Watch, Tartle, a data-sharing startup, and Pebble Labs, a biotics startup based in Los Alamos.
Other startups, like Vitazi.ai, Ursa Science and Molten Salt Solutions, are Incubator clients, as well.
Click through photos inside the Santa Fe Business Incubator in the below gallery.
Carl McLendon, the Incubator's program manager, told New Mexico Inno the organization's lab, office and manufacturing space is close to maxed out. But space usually opens up cyclically, as existing companies move into their own facilities or consolidate their work, McLendon added.
Spaces available at the Incubator include offices, light manufacturing areas, warehousing and wet labs, alongside other workspaces, a fabrication laboratory and a bioscience-specific laboratory.
The cost to rent lab, light manufacturing and warehouse spaces ranges from $400 per month to $800 per month. Other workspaces come with smaller fees — $75 for a 10-visit punch card and $60 per day for a private drop-in office.
Companies can also rent specific benches in the Incubator's bioscience lab for between $1,000 to $1,200 per bench.
Aside from in-house tenants, the Incubator also includes an affiliate client program. Those clients pay $200 per month for access to conference rooms and drop-in office space, in addition to programming and coaching.
For especially early stage companies, the Incubator offers a pre-incubation program called Runway. It costs $200 for the course, which is designed to help firms assess the market potential of their ideas by speaking with prospective customers and networking with more established business leaders.
And, the Incubator maintains a network of business advisors who mentor clients and affiliates. Current advisors include Drew Tulchin, president of the New Mexico Angels, Dorian Rader of OneTen° Capital and Jon Mertz with Santa Fe Innovates.
Government partners like the City of Santa Fe's Economic Development Department and the U.S. Economic Development Department have supported the Incubator. The U.S. Small Business Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation are ongoing supporters of the Incubator, as well.
It received funding from the New Mexico Economic Development Department in September 2022, one of four across the state to get $50,000 each. Other incubators that landed state dollars include the Enterprise Center at San Juan College, South Valley Economic Development Center and WESST Enterprise Center.
