Yolo County and the city of Woodland will consider funding part of an estimated $1 million expansion of the Lab@AgStart in Woodland, which is already the largest wet-lab startup space in the Central Valley.
AgStart, an incubator for agriculture and food technology startups, a year ago opened a $1.5 million lab and office complex at 1100 Main St. in downtown Woodland.
When it opened in May 2021, the Lab@AgStart had commitments for half of its space. It’s been full since the end of last year, according to a city staff report.
The Woodland City Council and the Yolo County Board of Supervisors will each consider investing $100,000 to expand the Lab@AgStart, and that will be augmented by other grants and funding sources for a total estimated at $1 million.
The startup companies in the Lab@AgStart have raised about $45 million in private capital and it has brought 50 new jobs, mostly scientific or management, to the region, the city said. In 2019, the city contributed $100,000 to the initial funding of Lab@AgStart, and that was leveraged sevenfold by federal and other grant investments.
The existing 4,800-square-foot space includes coworking space for startups; the Yocha Dehe Lab, a wet chemistry laboratory space with 28 work benches; and the Raley’s Food Lab, a certified food facility that allows startups to take ingredients they develop and experiment on recipes and formulas for new food products.
The proposed expansion would be over 3,000 square feet of space in the same building. It would add 26 more lab benches, plus a tissue culture and fermentation lab, which is a new amenity to Lab@AgStart. Many major local ag tech operations, like Bayer Crop Science, Marrone Bio Innovations Inc. (Nasdaq: MBII) and BioConsortia Inc. make extensive use of fermentation in their manufacturing processes.
Wet labs — equipped for testing and analysis of chemicals or biological matter — are necessary for life sciences, medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural research and experiments. Wet labs are in critical demand in the region, but most startups don’t have the resources or the creditworthiness to build out a lab themselves. That’s why shared resources in an accelerator are considered critical. Other startup lab spaces, including Inventopia in Davis and the Life Science Innovation Center, which is operated by the University of California Davis and HM.Clause in Davis, are full.
In their report, Woodland city staff say AgStart is the largest wet lab for startups in the Central Valley.
