In the Conejo and Pleasant valleys, where biotech giants such as Amgen Inc. set up shop and younger startups such as Capsida Biotherapeutics Inc. flourish, Hanson Lab Solutions Inc. is seeing a boom in business three years after the Covid-19 pandemic ended.
A Camarillo-based laboratory furniture maker proclaiming to be the largest single-source supplier of steel lab casework in the American West, Hanson Lab Solutions marked its spot on Inc. Magazine’s annual Inc. 5000 list, highlighting the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., for the third time last year. This time around, the company generated a three-year revenue growth rate of 56%.
The near quinquagenarian – open for business since 1977 – attributes its success to its flexibility and adaptability in a one-stop shop solution. It designs and produces from its own workshops, and without having to wait for various parties to get the moving parts together in a prolonged timeline, it can pump out lab solutions more efficiently and meet the versatile demands of a changing bioscience world.
“Everybody wants it faster today, and we’re enhancing, because we’re a one-stop shop, we control everything we do,” says Kurt Koloseike, who took over as chief executive last November. “We’re not waiting for a manufacturer, waiting for a designer or waiting for an installer or waiting for an outside party. We are the solution.”
Industry overview
The flourishing business buoys upon a global undercurrent of a thriving industry. Indian market research company Facts & Factors Research valued the global lab furniture market at $6.42 billion in 2024 and projects nearly double growth at more than $11.7 billion by 2034, with an anticipated compound annual growth rate of 9% between 2024 and 2034. Analysts from Facts & Factors attribute the growth to increasing investment in health care and education infrastructure, and a rising number of research and development facilities.
Flexible lab setups are also coming up as a major demand. The pandemic prompted companies to build “spec labs” that were not geared towards a specific end user for convenience and speed in a state of medical emergency. But now, as general labs saturated the market, tides have changed for more customizations, says Koloseike.
“It’s a real estate developer that is creating a format in pretty standard form that any basic lab can move into and then tweak later,” says Koloseike, describing spec labs. “Then probably in late (2023) going into 2024, you start to see the cycle pivot back to very end user-driven space.”
The change did not deter Hanson Lab Solutions’ business. The lab furniture designer’s prided flexibility afforded it to pivot quickly.
“Our products are meticulously designed and engineered to meet the demands that will change,” says Gina Almaguer, Hanson’s marketing director, dubbing them “future-ready lab design.”
“Modularity, adaptability, flexibility is at the core of all of our products that we design outside of just the high-level quality that we really put into it,” she adds.
And in the vaunted 101 Biotech Corridor – which holds over 40 bioscience companies sprung up around Amgen’s Thousand Oaks headquarters and stretches from Camarillo to Woodland Hills – things are looking bright in the new year.
Brent Reinke, a life sciences attorney at Newport Beach-based law firm Stradling Yocca Carlson and Rauth and chair of BioScience Alliance, says people are hoping funding for the bioscience sector would pick up this year.
“Everybody’s belief is this year, you’re going to see an uptick in financings and new companies and additional funding of existing companies,” says Reinke, who works out of his law firm’s Westlake Village location. “And as those companies grow, they’re going to need lab space.”
New year, new labs
The kinds of labs in demand, though, have changed with time.
Beyond wanting a customized lab for their specific needs, biotech companies are now seeking to incorporate artificial intelligence in their day-to-day operations.
Eli Lilly and Co. and Nvidia Corp. at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco announced plans to build a trailblazer artificial intelligence co-innovation lab that applies the technology on drug discovery. The announcement comes with a $1 billion investment to support the South San Francisco-based lab.
“By combining the latest advances in generative AI, robotics and high-performance computing with Lilly’s deep drug discovery expertise, we can potentially accelerate drug discovery timelines by years,” David Ricks, Eli Lilly’s chief executive, says in a statement.
The collaboration capped off a rising number of partnerships this year, reports New York City-based health care innovation campus and ecosystem Cure.
“In the first two weeks of January, Servier announced two major AI partnerships: an $888 million collaboration with Insilico Medicine and a deal with Iktos valued at more than €1 billion ($1.2 billion),” writes Cure’s Ryan Flinn. “GSK paid $50 million upfront to license AI models from Noetik for cancer research; and AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sanofi also announced separate partnerships with AI companies.”
In addition, Ireland-based Research and Markets values the global life sciences artificial intelligence market to be about $2.88 billion in 2024 and expected a compound annual growth rate of 25.23% till 2029, where the market reaches over $8.5 billion. It also points out that the U.S. is the largest market among its global counterparts due to a high demand “from almost all the life sciences applications.”
Beyond research, Reinke says the biotech sector is also using more computational and data analytics to assess what early-stage drugs may be more viable and successful down the line.
“These life science facilities are becoming kind of tech centers, because they are using AI and computational analysis in a bigger and more important way as part of the R&D and then eventually clinical trial process,” Reinke says.
The massive convergence between artificial intelligence and labs means an array of new needs, ranging from a simple cable reconfiguration to new electrical and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems that support high power consumption. They should also be able to handle the heat generated by high-performance computing equipment that supports the growing use of artificial intelligence, Reinke says.
Responding to the challenge, Hanson Lab Solutions developed USB ports for connected lab devices, combined data cables with electrical ones and offered customizable pre-wired and pre-plumbed bench systems, among others. Since technology changes so fast, Almaguer points out that Hanson focuses on the common pain point of power, while letting modularity and flexibility again take the center stage.
“You can change where the power box is, the ceiling panels and where it connects into the actual infrastructure of the building,” Almaguer says. “It’s all adaptable, whenever that needs to change.”
Koloseike adds: “All of our solutions are geared to help our customers facilitate a more effective and efficient workplace for them … If (our clients’) world is changing, we can change with it.”
Future Hanson expansion
While 80% of Hanson Lab Solutions’ customers were historically based in California, the company is always on the lookout for new markets. With its fast growth, Hanson Lab Solutions is looking to tap into the biggest pin on its map – Boston.
In a 2025 report by Dallas-based real estate services and investment firm CBRE Group Inc., the Boston-Cambridge life sciences cluster is the “premier location for the life sciences industry on the U.S. East Coast, if not the entire world.” Nearly 52,000 people work in research and development roles on about 56 million square feet of lab space, the largest inventory in the U.S., with another 3.9 million square feet under construction. The cluster also secured $55.9 billion of venture capital funding in the five years since 2019, beating the rest of the world.
And now, having had its fill of big-name collaborations in California, the West Coast top performer is coming to take a slice of the cake.
“We are big in San Diego. We are big in San Francisco. We don’t show up on the map at all in Boston. But we’re starting to,” Koloseike says. “So that’s the plan – the biggest market we haven’t even touched yet.”
