Episode 20 now available!

Ep 20 - Jessica Martin Eckerly, CEO and Co-Founder, Forward BIOLABS

​How Forward BIOLABS Gives Wisconsin's Biotech Founders a Running Start​

Forward BIOLABS didn't start with a $5 million check. It started with a napkin scratch.

When Jessica Martin Eckerly was at WiCell, a UW-Madison collaborator came asking for a little extra lab space to start a company. They made room. Within a couple of years that company had revenue and pharma collaborations, and other researchers started asking the same question. Do you have space for us too?

That napkin scratch became Forward BIOLABS, a nonprofit co-working lab that gives early-stage biotech startups a fully equipped place to begin. Today it's home to more than 40 startups that have collectively raised over $360 million.

This conversation gets into why biotech is so much harder and more expensive to bootstrap than software, and how shared lab space helps founders launch faster and stop going it alone.

We dig into the Elephas Bio story, why so many companies choose to stay and build in Wisconsin, the new ICP non-dilutive funding pilot, the Milwaukee expansion through Wisconsin's BioHealth Tech Hub, and why Jessica believes everyone in the ecosystem is a front door.

All that and more inside this episode

→ Listen to the Interview​

Topics discussed

• Why biotech is uniquely hard and expensive to bootstrap compared to software
• How a fully equipped, fully staffed lab gets founders to work on day one
• The end of going it alone: the camaraderie of founders on the same long timeline
• Everyone is a front door, and how the ecosystem refers founders to the right help
• The Elephas Bio story, from starting in the nest to 100+ employees and $150M+ raised
• Why so many biotech companies choose to stay and build in Wisconsin
• ICP, a first-of-its-kind non-dilutive funding pilot run with BioForward Wisconsin
• The Milwaukee pilot and the expansion of the Madison footprint
• How Forward BIOLABS screens for safety, science, and fit, not personality

→ Listen to the Interview​

Key learnings

It started with a napkin scratch.

Jessica didn't launch Forward BIOLABS with a war chest. The whole thing started when she was at WiCell and a UW-Madison collaborator came asking for a little extra space to start a company. They set him up in a small lab, and within a couple of years that company had revenue and pharma collaborations. Word got around, and other researchers on campus started asking the same question: do you have space for us too?

When she got the chance to take a sabbatical and chase the idea, she did exactly what every founder in her building now does. Fundraising, business plans, talking to potential customers, all while raising young kids at home. The pilot opened in 2018 and proved companies could cohabitate. As Jessica put it, this didn't start with five million dollars to go build it. It started by recognizing the need and serving customers immediately.

Biotech is uniquely hard and expensive to bootstrap.

A software startup can run on coffee, a laptop, and a little funding. A biotech company can't. You need lab space, hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, supplies, trained personnel, and a stack of safety and regulatory requirements before you can run a single experiment. On your own, that is months and serious money just to reach the starting line.

What Forward BIOLABS does is collapse all of that into day one. On orientation day, a founder walks into a lab that is already full of equipment and full of people ready to train them and fix that equipment when it breaks. Having it all in one place isn't just convenient. It saves months and real capital.

The real unlock is that founders don't have to go it alone.

The theme I kept coming back to in our conversation is isolation, or the end of it. Starting something nobody has done before is lonely work. Jessica described founders walking in and immediately gaining allies, people down the hall on the same long product-development timeline, wrestling with the same IP questions and the same fundraising grind.

That camaraderie isn't a nice-to-have. It is part of how companies survive the years it takes to get a biotech product to market. When you give builders a place and a community, more of them actually build.

Everyone is a front door to the ecosystem.

One of my favorite moments was when Jessica turned the tables and told me Startup Wisconsin is a front door too. Her framing stuck with me: the ecosystem is like an apartment building full of doors. It doesn't matter which one a founder walks through first, because everyone inside is pointing them down the hall to the next person who can help.

Forward BIOLABS lives that out by constantly referring people elsewhere. If a founder isn't a fit for the lab yet, the team still has the conversation, answers questions, and connects them to whoever can help right now. That generosity is exactly the connective tissue a healthy ecosystem runs on.

Elephas Bio shows what starting in the nest can become.

When I asked for a story, Jessica pointed to Elephas Bio. They came to Forward BIOLABS during the pandemic, got to work right away, and graduated into their own space on Madison's west side. Today they have somewhere between 100 and 150 employees and have raised over $150 million. In 2026 they're launching a platform to help cancer patients learn whether their immunotherapy will work before they go through it.

What I love about the example is who founded it. Manish Aurora came up alongside Kevin Conroy at Third Wave and Exact Sciences, and even he says the shared lab was a great starting spot. As Jessica put it, all comers are welcome, whether you are a serial winner, a university professor, or someone stepping out of industry for the first time.

Why biotech companies stay in Madison.

There is a real pull for biotech companies to leave for Boston or San Francisco once they scale. Jessica's answer for why so many stay came down to talent. Madison and the broader state produce a continual renewal of world-class people, not just undergrads but PhDs and postdocs, plus a deep bench of industry talent from the big companies already here.

She described it as a cluster effect. If you need to hire someone in regulatory or quality, there is a host of companies, large and small, that talent flows between. That depth is something you don't find everywhere, and she is grateful it hasn't been a problem in Wisconsin.

A first-of-its-kind funding pilot and the Milwaukee expansion.

Forward BIOLABS is in the middle of a bigger push tied to Wisconsin's EDA-designated BioHealth Tech Hub. Part of that is ICP, the Innovation to Commercialization Pipeline, a non-dilutive funding program where companies apply against a specific milestone, whether that's IND-enabling studies, getting to key conferences, or landing sales partners. Jessica called it the first of its kind in the state, run with BioForward Wisconsin.

The other pieces are a Milwaukee pilot and an expansion of the Madison footprint. Stakeholders in Milwaukee had been asking for help almost since Forward BIOLABS started, and now there are boots on the ground building relationships across the Medical College of Wisconsin and UW-Milwaukee. The Madison move into the MG Innovation Center will bring more shared equipment, which opens the door to more kinds of startups, including ag tech and clean tech.

They screen for safety, science, and fit, not personality.

I asked how they keep the culture healthy. Jessica was clear: the screening is about safety, science, and cultural fit, not personality. The first question is always whether the work can be done safely alongside everyone else's, and they lean on expert advisors when something falls outside their wheelhouse.

What they don't do is filter for a type of person. Some founders are heads-down and home by evening. Others are at every event. The one real requirement is a willingness to work in a coworking environment, and founders tend to self-select into that when they reach out.

Upcoming episodes 👀

• Kai Heineman (Creative Destruction Lab)
• Nadiyah Johnson (Milky Way Tech Hub)

What is the Startup Wisconsin Podcast?

It's a new show where you can learn about Wisconsin's growing tech scene. Hear the stories of startups, founders, investors, and the incredibly generous people making it happen every single day.

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