Take the elevators or stairs up two floors from the Spaceship, and you reach the fourth-floor robotics wing, headed by Xenia and Vitaly Bulatov, a husband-and-wife team from the East Bay with backgrounds in growth marketing and R&D. Since launch, they’ve welcomed 17 members, a mix of solo founders and small startups, like Carbon Origins, which develops VR remote tools for robots, and Robonomics, whose humanoid is housed here. The floor has a capacity of 80 people, said Xenia, who has dubbed it the “Cyberpunk Lab.” 

Since robotics companies tend to be located in warehouses in the city’s outskirts — inconvenient for investors, according to Xenia — the central Mid-Market location is part of the draw. “This is a really accessible place … we’re 10 minutes away from Union Square,” she said. “There is a lot of potential in this neighborhood.” The Bulatovs keep a $50,000 Unitree Robotics Humanoid G1 and a $75,000 Boston Dynamics Spot dog locked in their office, available for members to borrow. 

Only Cyberpunk Lab members have unfettered access to the floor, via a mobile app that also works on the tower entrance and in the elevator. Nonmembers must be admitted at the front desk.

In March, Elliot Roth, founder of the BioPunk community laboratory in the Design District, packed up his centrifuges, isolation boxes, and various machinery and moved to the eighth floor of Frontier Tower, the biotech floor. “I want us to use synthetic biology to solve real-world problems,” he said.

Roth’s working on getting his lab BSL-2 certified, which would allow researchers to safely study bacteria and viruses that carry a moderate risk. As of last week, some of his expensive equipment was still in boxes.

Laurence Ion co-leads the longevity unit on the 11th floor. One member of his wing is building out a hyperbaric oxygen therapy startup, offering sessions to residents, and another is considering offering members IV drip therapies. On June 20, this floor will transform into “Viva Frontier,” a six-week “pop-up village” inside the vertical village, which organizers are marketing for “pioneers in longevity, AI, crypto, and more.” The idea is a teaser for Ion’s vision for Viva City, a permanent community that would aim to “make death optional” — tropical location TBD.