Jordan Losavio, co-founder of Baton Rouge-based tech startup Encore CO2, needed a custom part last month for a prototype that aims to transform carbon emissions into useful chemicals.
A local machine shop told her it would take nine days and $350 to make the part. Instead, she turned to a machinist 1,500 miles away at the Brooklyn, New York, headquarters of Newlab.
Losavio handed over $50 and the design specifications. Twenty-four hours later, she had the iPhone-sized Teflon ring she needed for Encore’s latest test.
“When you’re a startup, you don’t have weeks to wait,” Losavio said. “I need to be able to try something out, then say, ‘Hey, pivot this by X percentage,’ go back to that manufacturing hub and make it again.”
Avoiding those types of delays, as well as those cross-country calls for help, is a big reason why Louisiana officials are cheering the announcement that Newlab, which runs startup accelerators in New York, Detroit and Uruguay, is coming to New Orleans.
On Monday, Newlab announced that it’s opening its newest hub for innovation at the site of the former Navy base in the Bywater neighborhood — part of a $50 million public-private partnership between the city, Shell Oil, Louisiana Economic Development, LSU and Greater New Orleans Inc.
The company, which is also expanding to Saudi Arabia, helps start-ups trying to solve the climate crisis and other engineering problems take their ideas from the lab to the real world.
A different kind of startup accelerator
Louisiana has incubators focused on biotech, software and nonprofits. It also has co-working spaces sponsored by universities. But Newlab New Orleans will bring a particular mix of offerings that officials say could fill a critical niche for engineering-heavy startups.
Elizabeth Maxwell, senior director of strategic initiatives at Idea Village, the city’s first business accelerator, said she hopes the companies that Idea Village is working with can take advantage of Newlab’s lab space and equipment.
“Hopefully, there will be a revolving door,” she said.
Kris Khalil, head of the New Orleans BioInnovation Lab, said he sees “tremendous opportunities for collaboration, where our biotech founders might benefit from Newlab’s advanced prototyping and expertise, and in turn, we can offer specific insights for biotech or health applications in Newlab’s portfolio.”
The Newlab facility will span 30,000 square feet and will be staffed with a team of experts in 3D printing, advanced machining and more to help startups quickly make the custom parts they need.
The site will also include a set of industrial bays — equipped with overhead cranes and fume hoods — where start-ups can build and test their prototypes.
That access to machinery and industrial space is hard to come by and means that startups can focus resources on scaling up research instead of spending it on building out their own workshop.
Newlab, which calls itself a “venture platform,” also helps startups find investors, market their technologies and work with industrial partners to test out their designs in the real world.
“Newlabs’ presence here is a bridge between where we’ve been and where we’re going,” LED Secretary Susan Bourgeois said at Monday’s announcement, calling it a “milestone in Louisiana’s economic evolution.”
Why Newlab is coming to Louisiana
The global push to decarbonize the economy can be measured in trillions of dollars, Josh Fleig, LED’s chief innovation officer, said at Monday’s event. If Louisiana doesn’t invest in new forms of energy production now it will cede its role in the future as a global leader in energy to places like Texas, Fleig said.
Louisiana’s massive industrial base produces an outsized amount of planet-warming emissions. That “deep industrial legacy” is part of what attracted Newlabs to Louisiana, said David Belt, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “You’re sitting on one of the most strategic hubs of energy in the country,” he said.
Newlab New Orleans will initially focus on accelerating technologies across three different sectors: industrial power, carbon management and utilization, and shipping and maritime.
Newlab focuses on working with “deep tech” startups — a term for companies that are building hardware based on years of research and development.
That includes Encore CO2, which is planning to move into Newlab New Orleans once it’s built. The start-up, which was born out of research done at LSU, is developing technology that transforms carbon emissions into high-value industrial chemicals with potential applications from consumer goods to agriculture.
Encore CO2 has already demonstrated that its propriety technology works on a small-scale in a laboratory, Losavio said. It’s now trying to scale up that technology for an industrial setting. The company became a member of Newlab last year with funding from a Department of Energy grant.
Robert Twilley, LSU’s vice president for research and economic development, said he hopes Newlab’s expertise will help usher academic research into the market.
“One thing we do a great job of is generating knowledge,” Twilley said. “We don’t do a very good job of commercializing it.”
Losavio, who is pursuing a PhD at LSU, said that in her many years on the Baton Rouge campus, she never once heard faculty or staff mention turning research into entrepreneurship.
“That’s a fundamental problem, and Newlab understand that’s problem,” she said.
Newlab is expected to open its hub in New Orleans by the end of 2026.
