Photos of Biomeme’s Old City HQ

Biomeme’s office is one long room that’s part lab space, part hardware engineering studio, part traditional startup open floor plan. White lab coats hang on one door, near the eyewash station and biohazard trash can, while bikes rest in the center and staffers gesture at product mockups on whiteboards. There’s even dry-erase notes on the windows.
The biggest investment for the biotech startup’s new office? A minus-80 freezer to store samples longterm. It cost close to $10,000.
Biomeme moved into the 2,200-square-foot space on N3rd Street (it’s the same building as Indy Hall and Wildbit) last summer, after outgrowing its space at NextFab. Previous tenants of the office include dev shop DmgCtrl and legal staffing startup Hire an Esquire. It’s not that common to find a startup keeping its lab space and non-lab space all in the same room, but cofounder Jesse vanWestrienen said, “We felt it was important to all be in the same place.” Plus, Biomeme is only in R&D stages now and not working with “infectious agents,” vanWestrienen said, so there aren’t any safety risks associated with keeping it all in one spot.

Biomeme decided to get its own space instead of renting lab space at, say, the University City Science Center because of price. The price of a lab at the Science Center, which offers some shared equipment, is the same price as rent at the startup’s N3rd Street office, vanWestrienen said.
N3rd Street has also been good to them: their neighbors at Tamman Technologies spent hours helping them set up their routers when they moved in, and they plan on hosting a First Friday event next week to introduce people to their new DIY genomic test.
See below for more photos.