Before you sign the fit-out quote: a founder’s guide to your first lab

There’s a particular silence that falls over a founding team when the first fit-out quote lands. You’ve just closed a grant or a pre-seed round. The science is promising. And now a number is sitting in your inbox that would swallow a third, maybe half, of the money you raised to prove that science works.

Most bio and deep tech founders don’t run out of ideas. They run out of runway – and a surprising amount of it disappears in the gap between ‘we need a lab’ and ‘we ran our first experiment’.

This guide is for founders at that moment: spinning out of a university, leaving a corporate lab, finishing an accelerator, or hiring your first scientist and realising they need somewhere to stand. It covers what a lab really costs, which rules actually apply to you, and how to weigh your options before you commit.

The fit-out is the cheapest part of the problem

The quote you’re looking at usually covers walls, benches, services and ventilation. What it rarely shows is everything that comes after:

• Equipment. Biosafety cabinets, autoclaves, incubators, centrifuges, cold storage – bought new, often before you know which ones you’ll use daily.
• Certification and compliance. Getting a space certified, then keeping it that way with audits, servicing and documented procedures.
• Waste and consumables. Biological and chemical waste streams need contracts, storage and records.
• The lease. Commercial lab leases tend to run for years, not months – a long commitment for a company whose plans may change after the next experiment.
• Someone to run it. Somebody has to manage safety, maintenance and suppliers. In a five-person startup, that’s usually a scientist who should be doing science.

Add it up and the real question isn’t ‘can we afford the fit-out?’ It’s ‘how many months of runway does this cost us, and what would those months have bought in data?’

Know which rules actually apply to you

Compliance is where founders lose the most sleep, mostly because nobody tells them plainly what’s required. A few questions narrow it down fast:

1. Are you working with genetically modified organisms? In Australia, dealings with GMOs are regulated by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, and many need a certified facility – commonly PC2 – plus oversight from an Institutional Biosafety Committee.
2. What biological material are you handling? The risk group of your organisms and cell lines sets your containment level and the procedures around it.
3. What chemicals, gases or radiation are involved? Each brings its own storage, signage and handling requirements.
4. What will investors and partners ask for? Due diligence increasingly looks at where data was generated and whether the facility can stand behind it.

If you can answer those four, you’ll know whether you need a bench in a certified shared space or something far more specialised – and you’ll stop paying for containment you don’t need.

Time is the cost nobody quotes

A fit-out is a construction project. Design, approvals, building, commissioning and certification all happen in sequence, and each step can slip. Meanwhile your grant milestones and investor updates keep their dates.

Every month spent waiting for a lab is a month of salaries with no experiments behind them. For a company with 12–24 months of runway, a few months’ delay can be the difference between raising on data and raising on hope.

Your options, side by side

Option	Best for	Watch out for
Stay in the university lab	Early research, before spin-out	Access agreements end; IP and priority questions; shared with academic timelines
Outsource to a CRO	Well-defined, repeatable assays	You lose hands-on iteration; costs climb as experiments multiply
Shared, certified lab space	Teams of 1–10 who need to iterate fast	Check containment level, equipment list and how you’d scale within the space
Build your own	Teams with proven science, specialised needs and the capital to match	Cost, lease length, time to first experiment, ongoing compliance load

None of these is wrong. The mistake is choosing the last option at the stage where one of the first three would do – and spending your proof money on infrastructure.

Plan for growth, not for size

A common worry with shared space is outgrowing it. That’s a good problem, and worth planning for. Ask any provider how you’d move from one bench to several, then into a dedicated suite, without changing buildings or re-certifying from scratch. The best setup lets your footprint follow your data, not your forecasts.

Prove it before you build it

The founders who move fastest treat their first lab as a runway decision, not a real estate one. They get to a compliant bench quickly, spend their raise on experiments, and build their own facility only once the science – and the next round – justify it.

At CoLabs, that’s the path we’ve built for: certified lab space, shared equipment and an expert team in Brunswick, Notting Hill and Eveleigh, available from a single bench up. But whichever route you choose, run the numbers first.

Run the numbers on your first lab. The Fit-out Calculator compares a fit-out with a shared bench over your actual runway – and gives you a one-page facilities plan you can hand straight to investors.

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