BUILT… in a Barn

George McArthur left Virginia to build a career in synthetic biology, working at some of the industry’s most respected DNA manufacturing companies on the West Coast. Along the way, he kept running into the same bottleneck: assembling DNA quickly and reliably was slow across the entire industry, and no one had built a company to fix it. He always intended to come back to Virginia and build that company here.

He did, starting BUILT Biotechnologies out of his family’s farmhouse in Orange County. For the first nine months, the company existed only as software. When the lab needed a home, George’s father suggested the barn. They added a second floor, conditioned the space, and turned it into a working laboratory, built to fill an order for full-length custom DNA that competitors had tried and failed to deliver.

From that barn, BUILT eventually found its way into the Commonwealth BioAccelerator and the broader CvilleBioHub ecosystem. George had known Nikki Hastings for years by then, long before he needed a lab of his own. CvilleBioHub offered more than space: it gave BUILT a community of founders who had made the same bet on building in Virginia.

George’s story is, in many ways, the story CvilleBioHub was designed to make possible: talented people who don’t have to choose between ambition and home, because the ecosystem to support both exists right here.