• Base One, a 55,000 sq ft Sciopolis/Imperial College London hub in North Acton, opened September 9, 2026, with 24 CL2 labs and 29 flexible offices.
• Nanomox closed a £2.4 million seed round (led by TSP Ventures and Boast Trading LLC) on February 10, 2026, earmarked for a first commercial pilot plant.
• Ki 13 closed a $5 million seed round (led by HICO Investment Group) on September 2, 2026 — a week before Base One's opening — to fund an industrial pilot plant.
• The bet behind both rounds: investors priced pilot manufacturing as rentable infrastructure, not a capex line, freeing more of the raised capital for the process risk the rounds actually exist to prove.
• Base One's own build cost is undisclosed; the hub's verifiable financial story so far is its tenants' seed rounds, not its own capitalization.

Base One's September 9, 2026 opening reads as real-estate news, but the bet underneath it belongs to venture capital: two of the hub's three named tenants, Nanomox and Ki 13, closed 2026 seed rounds explicitly to fund pilot-scale production, then chose to rent that production step from Sciopolis and Imperial College London rather than build it themselves. The traction their investors bought is a lease, not a plant.

The hub opened; two tenants already paid for the real story

Sciopolis, developing the site with Imperial College London, opened Base One at 1 Portal Way in North Acton on September 9, 2026: 55,000 sq ft split across 24 CL2 laboratories and 29 flexible offices, built for companies moving from lab bench to first commercial production. Howard Dawber, London's Deputy Mayor for Business and Growth, called it space for businesses to "start, grow and scale." The sharper number sits one door down: two of the three named tenants had already closed seed rounds explicitly to fund the pilot-plant step Base One now rents them instead of building.

The bet: capital efficiency over control

The bet behind both rounds is the same one: that pilot-stage manufacturing is safer to rent than to own. TSP Ventures, Boast Trading LLC and HICO Investment Group priced Nanomox's and Ki 13's seed rounds on the wager that shared CL2 lab space at Base One would get each company to proof-of-scale faster and cheaper than a bespoke facility would — freeing more of £2.4 million and $5 million, respectively, for the ionic-liquid and electrolysis process work the rounds were actually raised to prove.

Nanomox: £2.4 million, seven months before move-in

Nanomox, the Imperial spinout founded by then-PhD student Francisco Malaret in 2020, closed a £2.4 million seed round on February 10, 2026, led by TSP Ventures and Boast Trading LLC with Imperial College Enterprise Fund 3, SNØCAP VC, the Circular Innovation Fund, EIT RawMaterials and UK angels participating. The stated use of funds is a commercial pilot plant, Catalyst 1, scaling Nanomox's ionic-liquid process for recovering zinc oxide and other metals from waste streams — the same production step Nanomox is now running out of Base One, per UKTN's tenant list.

Ki 13: $5 million, a week before the ribbon-cutting

Ki 13 — rebranded from Ki Hydrogen, and previously backed by a pre-seed round of undisclosed size — closed a $5 million seed round on September 2, 2026, led by HICO Investment Group with Burgest, Triple Impact Ventures, GiTV, Desai Ventures and Innovate UK match funding. CEO Koji Muto's stated use of funds is an industrial pilot plant testing the company's biomass-to-hydrogen electrolysis process at scale. Base One opened seven days later, with Ki 13 among its first tenants — the seed round's capex line landing as a lease, not a construction budget.

What Base One is actually pricing

A CL2 lab and a first commercial pilot line are among the most capital-intensive, hardest-to-reverse line items a deep-tech seed round funds. Sciopolis and Imperial are underwriting that risk instead: Base One's fit-out is shared infrastructure multiple tenants can occupy in sequence. For Nanomox and Ki 13, that converts a build-or-lease decision most seed decks treat as capex into rent — leaving a larger share of £2.4 million and $5 million, respectively, for the process work the money was actually raised to prove.

The tenant that isn't mid-raise

The third named tenant, P.Happi, is a different case: its intimate-health serum is already stocked at Boots, past the R&D-to-production question its labmates are still funding their way through. Its presence at Base One — one of the hub's three current occupants per UKTN — signals the space is pitched at commercial-stage tenants as well as pilot-stage ones, not solely at seed-round manufacturing bottlenecks.

The verdict

Base One's launch reads as real-estate news; the funding underneath it reads as a capital-efficiency pattern. Two of three named tenants raised 2026 seed rounds that bet on renting pilot manufacturing rather than building it, and both moved in within months of closing. Watch whether Sciopolis fills its remaining CL2 capacity with the same profile — freshly seeded, pilot-stage, deliberately avoiding its own plant — because that occupancy mix, not the ribbon-cutting, is the real read on whether shared lab infrastructure is becoming a standard line in London deep-tech seed rounds.