Brooklyn's Newlab Partners With Alphabet's X and Boston Globe

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a revitalized 300-acre industrial park that's home to self-driving shuttles and Newlab, an incubator providing mentorship, hardware, and partnership opportunities to 150+ emerging tech startups with over $700 million in VC funding.

What does Newlab look for? Companies "trying to apply frontier technologies" to "industries that will be in our society's lives forever," Chief Product Officer Satish Rao told me. That includes farming, food production, mining, construction, city planning, and more.

• Newlab was initially focused on smart factories and advanced manufacturing robotics, but has since expanded its remit.

"I've always thought that New York is a center of gravity for talent if you give them a reason to come," Rao said. Many Newlab startups are building products specifically for NYC or the tristate area, but should be able to scale to regions with worse bagels.

The latest

A few weeks ago, Newlab and X, Alphabet's moonshots arm, formed a partnership in which Newlab startups will get the chance to pitch X on an investment or a possible acquisition.

And last week, Newlab and the Boston Globe launched Applied XLabs. The startup is creating AI tools that can crawl through dense information and extract insights for journalists.