SYNE Labs is home for engineering and technology ventures at their earliest and most ambitious stage - providing the space, capital, expertise, infrastructure and community to turn bold ideas into companies.
SYNE Labs was established in Kochi in 2014 alongside the founding of SYNE Ventures - with a single conviction: that great engineering and technology companies need more than capital. They need infrastructure, mentorship, domain expertise, and a community of peers who understand the grind of building from scratch.
Based in Sydney and Kochi - cities with a deep tradition of trade, technology and ambition - the labs is purpose-built for engineering and deep technology ventures. We specialise in companies where the product is hard to build, the science is non-trivial, and the founder needs more than a co-working desk.
From lab benches to legal compliance, from prototype to pitch - the labs wraps every service a founding team needs around the one thing they should be focused on: building.
Private studio offices, open collaboration zones, meeting rooms and high-speed infrastructure - all designed for the rhythms of early-stage building. Resident teams get 24/7 access in a community of peer founders.
Hands-on lab infrastructure for hardware prototyping, materials testing, electronics development and software engineering - shared facilities that would cost a founding team years of runway to build independently.
SYNE provides pre-seed and seed-stage capital to incubatee companies as minority stakes - structured to preserve founder equity and control. Funding is milestone-based and tied to programme progress.
A structured validation programme helps founders stress-test assumptions before committing to a build. We run structured problem - solution workshops, market sizing exercises, and early customer discovery sprints.
Access to domain experts, university research partnerships and proprietary technology intelligence across our focus sectors - helping founders understand what exists, what’s possible, and where the edge truly is.
Curated hiring support for technical and commercial roles. We maintain a network of engineers, scientists, and operators who want to join early-stage companies - and help founders make their first critical hires.
Shared CFO and accounting services for incubatee companies - covering bookkeeping, payroll, MIS reporting, investor-ready accounts and budgeting. Founders focus on building; we handle the numbers.
Company incorporation, equity structuring, IP registration, regulatory compliance and contract review - delivered through our network of specialist legal partners. Everything a startup needs to be clean and investable.
A curated peer community of SYNE founders - past and present. Founder Club provides regular roundtables, co-founder matching, knowledge-sharing dinners and direct access to the broader SYNE investor and mentor network.
Structured workshops to validate the problem, understand the technology landscape and define the founding team’s unique edge. Weekly expert sessions and peer reviews sharpen the thesis before any build begins.
Lab access, technical mentorship and engineering support for the first working prototype. Founders get hands-on time with our fabrication and compute infrastructure, plus weekly co-build sessions with the SYNE team.
Structured customer pilots with support from SYNE’s commercial network. Founders test their go-to-market thesis, refine pricing, and gather evidence that supports a compelling seed fundraise.
Each cohort concludes with SYNE Demo Day - a curated showcase for investors, corporates and strategic partners. Graduating companies are investment-ready, with SYNE’s continued support as a minority stakeholder.
Our Kochi facility houses purpose-built lab and workshop infrastructure for engineering and technology ventures. Resident founders get access to equipment that would otherwise consume years of runway - available from day one.
Full-featured electronics prototyping including oscilloscopes, signal analysers, soldering stations, PCB milling and component libraries. Built for embedded systems, IoT and hardware startups.
Industrial 3D printers (FDM, resin and metal), CNC routing, laser cutting and a full hand-tool workshop - for founders who need to move from CAD to physical artefact fast.
A ventilated wet lab equipped for materials characterisation, basic chemical processing and small-scale synthesis - supporting deep tech, cleantech and advanced materials ventures.
On-premise GPU cluster for AI/ML model training, inference testing and large-scale data processing - accessible to all residents, with dedicated allocation for AI-native ventures.
Climate-controlled rack space, redundant networking and private VLAN infrastructure - for companies with data residency requirements or proprietary hardware in continuous operation.
Environmental testing, vibration and load analysis, basic EMC pre-compliance testing - enabling hardware founders to validate robustness before engaging specialist testing houses.
SYNE Labs is designed for a specific kind of founder: one who is building something technically difficult, scientifically grounded, or fundamentally new. We are not a generalist incubator.
We back founders in our six investment sectors - Sustainability, Climate Technology, Deep Tech, Decarbonisation, Software & AI, and Space Technologies - at ideation stage through to their first institutional seed round.
We especially welcome applications from women-led teams, founders of colour, and Indigenous-led ventures across Australia and India.
Applications to the SYNE Labs are reviewed on a rolling basis. We run two cohorts per year - accepting between 6 and 10 companies per cohort. The process is direct, the conversation is human, and decisions are made by founders.