The pitch is almost suspiciously simple: stop building labs, start renting them. SmartLabs designs, constructs, staffs and operates private research space, then hands you the keys - IP intact, science yours, ductwork somebody else's problem.
On the strange, sensible business of selling infrastructure so scientists can skip the construction.
Here is a fact about biotechnology that nobody puts on the recruiting poster: the science is often the easy part. You can hire brilliant people, you can have a molecule that works, you can raise a Series A on a Tuesday - and then you discover that before anyone pipettes anything, you need to sign a ten-year lease, commission a fifty-million-dollar buildout, negotiate with HVAC contractors, and satisfy a biosafety inspector. The molecule waits. The clock, which in drug development is the only thing that truly matters, keeps running.
SmartLabs, founded in Boston in 2015 as Mass Innovation Labs, looked at that gap and asked a question that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud: what if the lab were infrastructure you rent instead of real estate you finance? This is, roughly, the question Amazon asked about servers. You used to buy a data center. Then AWS let you rent one by the hour, and an entire generation of companies discovered they could spend their capital on the product instead of the plumbing. SmartLabs is running that play for wet labs - a category that, unlike servers, involves negative-pressure air, live cells, and the occasional research animal.
The company calls its model Laboratory-as-a-Service, and its flagship product Managed Research Centers: private, enterprise-grade R&D and manufacturing space that SmartLabs builds, staffs, and operates, then leases on flexible terms. A team can be running experiments in weeks rather than the eighteen months a ground-up buildout typically demands. SmartLabs claims the approach can save up to 95% versus doing it yourself - a number worth treating as a marketing figure rather than an audited one, but directionally the point stands: a lab stops being a capital project and becomes a line item.
The best infrastructure is invisible. You don't think about the power grid until it fails - SmartLabs wants lab space to feel exactly that boring.
What makes this more than a fancy sublease is the operating layer. SmartLabs doesn't just hand you a room with a sink. It runs facilities management, environmental health and safety, quality assurance, veterinary sciences for in vivo work, and manufacturing support. The unglamorous machinery that makes science possible - the person who checks the freezer alarms, the paperwork that keeps a cleanroom compliant - is not a cost the tenant absorbs. It is the actual product. There is a genuine lesson in that about where value lives: not in the exciting part everyone photographs, but in the boring part everyone forgets until it breaks.
The trick that makes lab-as-a-service commercially interesting is a slightly counterintuitive one. Inside a single SmartLabs building, a three-person startup and a global pharmaceutical company can operate on either side of the same wall - and never share a data point, a sample, or a scrap of intellectual property. Enterprise-grade privacy, shared physical plant. It is community without compromise, which is a harder engineering and operational problem than it sounds, because the entire value proposition collapses the moment a tenant suspects the neighbors can see their science. Getting that right is most of what a decade of iteration buys you.
The tenants span the pipeline: discovery-stage startups, preclinical and clinical teams, contract research organizations, and established biopharma companies that want to spin up a program without waiting on their own real estate group. The facilities span the modalities that define modern biotech - R&D suites, cGMP clean suites for regulated manufacturing, in vivo research space, and cleanrooms suited to cell and gene therapy, biologics, and vaccine work. In other words, SmartLabs is not betting on any single scientific fashion. It is betting that whatever the science is, it will need a room, and that room is annoying to build.
The product line, from a bench to a manufacturing suite.
Private, enterprise-grade R&D and manufacturing space delivered as-a-service - no capital buildout, no long lease.
Turnkey space plus operations and scientific support, operational in weeks with reported savings up to 95%.
Customized private suites for discovery and preclinical work, reconfigurable as programs evolve.
Manufacturing-grade cleanrooms for biologics, cell and gene therapy, and vaccine production.
Vivarium space with veterinary sciences and compliance support for animal-health research.
Facilities, EHS, quality assurance and scientific operations - the running of the lab, handled.
Capital-intensive by design - which is rather the point of taking the capital off everyone else's books.
The funding history tells the story better than the press releases do. A $59.6M Series A in 2020 to prove the model, a $250M Series B in 2021 led by ArrowMark Partners to build the footprint, and a $48M Series C in January 2024 - arriving alongside a leadership change - to scale it. The Series C was smaller than the B, which is what you would expect from a company shifting from land-grab to operations, from proving the thesis to running the buildings profitably. Around the same round, biopharma veteran Brian Taylor - already running the company's biopharma solutions since 2020 and a 25-year industry hand - stepped in as interim CEO, a signal that the job had become less about the story and more about the spreadsheet.
From a Boston lab operator to an international infrastructure play.
Amrit Chaudhuri and Seth Taylor launch on the bet that lab space can be a service.
Capital to scale Managed Research Centers and operations.
ArrowMark Partners leads a raise that validates the lab-as-a-service thesis.
Anchoring a Philadelphia life-science building and signaling geographic growth.
The company's most sophisticated managed facility to date.
Brian Taylor steps in as the company shifts from proving to scaling.
Teaming with the flexible-workspace giant to bring managed labs to new markets.
Why the IWG deal is the most interesting thing SmartLabs has done.
In June 2025, SmartLabs signed a ten-year global partnership with IWG - the company behind Regus and a sprawling portfolio of flexible-workspace brands. On paper it reads like a real-estate transaction. In practice it is a distribution deal, and a fairly audacious one. IWG has buildings and local presence in cities all over the world. SmartLabs has the ability to turn a building into a functioning, compliant, staffed laboratory. Put those together and you get the possibility of managed lab space appearing in places that never had a biotech ecosystem to begin with.
The implication is worth pausing on. For decades, serious life-sciences research has clustered in a handful of expensive square miles - Kendall Square, South San Francisco, a few others - partly because that is where the labs were. If lab infrastructure becomes something you can deploy into a new market on demand, the geography of where science happens becomes a lot more negotiable. The next important therapy would no longer need to be discovered in Boston or the Bay. It could start anywhere there is a building and a scientist.
Whether it works is an open question. Deploying regulated lab space is genuinely hard, local scientific ecosystems are not summoned by real estate alone, and ten-year partnerships have a way of looking different in year three. But it is the rare corporate deal where the ambition matches the language. SmartLabs spent a decade proving the model works in the places biotech already lived. The IWG partnership is the bet that it can travel.
For now, the footprint is concrete and expanding: several sites across Massachusetts including Kendall Square, Cambridge, Boston Landing and the Seaport, plus South San Francisco and Sydney, with a Philadelphia location - a seventh, around 550,000 square feet - underway. Rooms in the right cities, rented by the people who would rather be doing science than signing leases. That, in the end, is the whole company.
It designs, builds, staffs and operates private laboratory facilities, then rents them to biotech and pharma companies as a fully managed service - enterprise-grade R&D and manufacturing space without long leases or capital buildouts.
SmartLabs' model of providing turnkey lab space plus operations and scientific support on flexible terms. Teams can be operational in weeks and reportedly save up to 95% versus building their own facility.
It was founded in 2015 in Boston - originally as Mass Innovation Labs - by Amrit Chaudhuri and Seth Taylor.
About $334M total: a $59.6M Series A (2020), a $250M Series B led by ArrowMark Partners (2021), and a $48M Series C (2024).
Across Massachusetts (Kendall Square, Cambridge, Boston Landing, Seaport) and South San Francisco, plus Sydney, Australia, with a Philadelphia expansion underway.
Watch & explore: search YouTube for SmartLabs interviews & product demos, including co-founder Amrit Chaudhuri on the modern lab and drug-development trends via Fierce Biotech.