There’s now 84,000 more square feet on the Brooklyn banks of the East River ready to be used for tech manufacturing. The much-anticipated New Lab opened officially last week, bringing to life a sort of first-of-its-kind coworking space for hardware in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“It is a breakthrough ecosystem of shared resources where entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and academics—in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and connected devices—can take their ideas from concept to prototype to production all under one roof,” the company said in a statement.
Its first tenants include space-tech makers Honeybee Robotics, workplace-tech firm Strongarm Technologies and nanotechnology startup Nanotronics Imaging.
Cutting ribbon @NewLab in @BklynNavyYard w/ @EmpireStateDev @BPEricAdams @StephenLevin33 @prattcenter @DMAliciaGlen pic.twitter.com/YnpNyZ6yZf
— Turnstile Tours & Studio (@TurnstileTours) June 21, 2016
All tenants will have their own workspace, as well as access to a prototyping workshop that’s open 24/7 and staffed by New Lab employees. The workshop, “has been designed to facilitate manufacturing design workflow from prototyping to product realization.”
New Lab is the anchor tenant within a larger building at the Navy Yard called the Green Manufacturing Center, also known as Building 128, which is 250,000 square feet in total. The building was built in 1902 as a shipbuilding factory for the Navy. Its conversion to the Green Manufacturing Center and the inclusion of New Lab is part of the Navy Yard’s massive expansion.
“We believe that the future of tech and manufacturing are going to intersect in places like New York,” said Navy Yard CEO David Ehrenberg in an interview with Technical.ly Brooklyn this spring. “With the internet of things or medical devices, that embedding of tech into every product is really just beginning in some ways. We want to be that spot in New York where these things intersect. To do that we believe we have to operate the Yard as a true 21st-century business hub.”
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