Tacoma’s biotech incubator was meant to help fuel city’s growth. What happened?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- RAIN Incubator in Tacoma closed in 2024 as a result of financial struggles.
- Leadership cited state funding shifts and challenge of maintaining stream of viable startups for incubator as key issues.
- Biotech sector trends in recent years have favored large VC deals, sidelining smaller ventures.
For years, a nonprofit biotech hub was a prime force leading Tacoma’s aspirations in the life-sciences sector. It made headlines for its research during COVID-19 along with its education, research and incubator services.
For the past eight months, it has been winding down operations.
RAIN Incubator, 2304 Jefferson Ave., officially shut down at the end of 2024. The move came after a board of directors’ decision earlier that summer following several budget reviews of the hub’s dwindling finances.
That’s according to Jenna McKee-Johnson, the former co-executive director of the incubator. McKee-Johnson recently spoke to The News Tribune about the closure in response to questions about its business-closure listing on Google.
In 2022, “We basically made the decision to give ourselves about 18 months to try some new things, work with the state,” she said. “In the end, we knew that the state was going to have a change in their funding, which was going to directly impact us.”
After a presentation made to the board last August, “the board made the decision that it was time to close RAIN and move on to something new,” she said.
Another presentation that had been scheduled the next month to the Tacoma City Council’s Economic Development Committee was scuttled. The topic was listed as “an update on new programs and restructuring to insure sustainability of this biotechnology incubator in Tacoma.”
“Prior to the presentation, RAIN informed me of their imminent closure,” Paul Bakker, business and economic development analyst for the city’s Community and Economic Development, told The News Tribune via email this week. “In light of this, it didn’t make sense to continue with the presentation.”
The closure was heartbreaking, McKee-Johnson said, and the wind down of operations is continuing to this day, noting there’s a lot of time after the initial end “where you are working through the closing up of finances, closing down things with the state, making sure all your tax filings are appropriate.
“We’re in that process right now,” she said.
After more than six years with RAIN, she is now a lab manager for the University of Washington Tacoma.
A look back at RAIN’s tenure
RAIN, which stood for the Readiness Acceleration & Innovation Network, was launched in 2017 to provide start-up companies “with significant support for ideation, research and development, prototyping, business development, and launch,” according to its original online biography.
The incubator was founded as a collaboration involving representatives of University of Washington Tacoma, MultiCare Health System and Madigan Army Medical Center.
The site was promoted at the time as a home for “blue-collar tech” in the city. It was a space for biotech science and research but also included culinary exploration via a commercial kitchen and event space.
The idea was that entrepreneurs could gain a foothold at the incubator, work to grow a startup and eventually expand with a standalone site in Tacoma.
It was meant to attract entrepreneurs, researchers, full-fledged companies, startups and most importantly, students, who would receive training and encouragement to stay in Tacoma.
In March 2020, the incubator made news as its labs researched ways to advance COVID-19 testing.
“The objective of these labs is really to be to work on infectious disease, all the technologies you’d need to support any kind of outbreak,” RAIN Incubator founder David Hirschberg said at the time. The next month, researchers at RAIN announced progress made in testing for indications of the virus in the city’s sewer system.
By 2022, McKee-Johnson said that RAIN’s board was considering ways the incubator would move forward post-pandemic, allowing the entity to see how things would go over the next 18 months. Belt-tightening included staff cuts.
In 2023 a public lecture series was launched to “dive into topics not usually covered in traditional scientific education,” according to promotions at the time. Topics were to cover food science, skincare chemistry, microplastics and more.
RAIN’s 2023 Form 990 tax document filed in 2024 with the IRS is its most recent filing found online. According to that, services at the site were on three tracks: RAIN Education, RAIN Research and RAIN Incubator, with a staff of 12 and one volunteer.
For the incubator, it stated that RAIN provided “access to laboratory spaces networking technical support and consulting. In 2023 four companies utilized RAINs laboratory spaces. These companies focused on biotechnology logistics, contract protein production, environmental technologies and process chemistry.”
In 2023 the form notes that RAIN’s commercial kitchen “hosted eight food vendors who sell products at local farmers and night markets.”
Its research arm provided “contract services to established firms that align with our mission to provide opportunity in the life-science industry with an emphasis on equity innovation and collaboration,” the form stated. “These projects create jobs for interns and trained students provide critical funding for RAIN and generate income for our incubator companies.”
Its education component was interrupted by the pandemic, it noted, but when operating “focused on hands-on science education for high school and college students.... These programs promote and help develop science-based critical thinking skills and teach laboratory techniques and skills used in biotechnology healthcare and academic research.”
It added, “As the pandemic continued well into 2022 several of RAINs educational programs remained on hold due to safety concerns; however RAIN used this time to develop curricula including that for a weekly bioengineering program for high school students and a potential synthetic biology club for high school and college students.”
It also offered a “Waterversity program, which trains individuals for jobs in the water treatment sector.”
Despite the interest among local scientists and entities hoping to launch their own startups at RAIN, funding could be a struggle for them, too, McKee-Johnson recounted.
The competition of luring biotech from King County to Pierce County also was never going to be easy, with cities such as Bothell and Seattle having long-established hubs, meaning the incubator generally had to set its sights on those just starting out.
“At the time we closed, I was talking with four different companies about them potentially locating at RAIN,” she said, “but none of them had been successful in landing funding to get themselves started.”
“So you can build it, and they might come, but they might not be able to afford to,” she said.
Net income as a result was a struggle for the site. According to its tax forms, 2023 alone showed a deficit of nearly $80,000 and more than $650,000 in expenses.
The sites financial woes were a snapshot of a larger biotech funding concentration squeezing out smaller entities.
A review of top biotech money raisers of 2024 published in March 2025 on Fierce Biotech’s news site noted that the previous two years had been “rocky” for the sector, but noted, “Higher overall figures are driven in part by megarounds (funding deals of $100 million or more) in A.I. and obesity, where big venture capitalists keep scoring but smaller firms are less successful.”
A separate report by HSBC Innovation Banking in July 2025 noted that second-quarter investments sector-wide this year had dropped 20 percent due to “continued headwinds and uncertainty.” BioPharma Dive, in its coverage of HSBC’s report, noted that investors were generally shying away from smaller deals and banding together “for larger fundings, such as ‘megarounds’ of $100 million or more.”
As the incubator’s team looked at the potential financial picture for 2025 and up to five years’ out, “there were some financial concerns that we just couldn’t get past,” McKee-Johnson said.
“Life is hard for all nonprofits,” she added. “It is a constant battle to get funding, and we just did not have the funding that would have allowed us to sustain operations.”
