The entrance to Lemnos Labs. Welcome. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Lemno Labs co-founder Jeremy Conrad sits in a weekly tagup meeting with NanoSatisfi, where he checks on the status of and gives advice to the company. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Lemnos Labs has a drawer of hardware packaging for its startups to study. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Steven Frehn of Momentum Machines lounges on a couch while he works in the garage space. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired NanoSatisfi's near-orbit satellite. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired A tangle of wires rests on one of the Lemnos Labs work tables. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired NanoSatisfi (name change coming soon) desks take up a large percentage of the Lemnos Labs office space. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired Momentum Machine's automatic burger maker. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired One of the Lemnos Labs office dogs wanders through the office. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired

Lemnos Labs' Eric Klein is chattering away about the brewing hardware revolution. He says that technology innovations in the last 10 years have made it possible for people to actually accomplish more with hardware for less. That lower barrier to entry will draw more and more people to building hardware.

"This thing is going to be huge," he says with a smile. "I would make the assertion that it's going to be bigger than software in some ways, because what we saw with the software revolution was an efficiency play. Everything became more efficient – how we do banking, just go industry by industry. That was in the digital world. Now imagine taking that same efficiency play and overlaying it in the physical world."

It's a shift that Silicon Valley has taken note of in the last couple of years. Hardware startups are increasingly sharing the spotlight with software companies. Take Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that lets you adjust point of focus; Square, the iPad dongle for financial transactions; and Pebble, the smartwatch that broke Kickstarter's funding record with more than $10 million pledged. Venture capitalists are finally biting, too.

"Our core thesis is that in the first six months, you're going to make a bunch of decisions that impact you for the next two to three years," Lemnos Labs co-founder Jeremy Conrad told Wired. "Our goal is that in that early phase, companies see the edges of the map."

Lemnos Labs is a hardware accelerator in San Francisco that invests in early stage startups and advises them as they get off the ground. The idea is that entrepreneurs stand to benefit not just from its money, but also the experience and network Lemnos has to offer. While it will drop up to $150,000 on the companies in its lab, like most incubators Lemnos argues its most valuable resources are its community and the hardware experience they can offer. It wants to be the soil that grows early players of Silicon Valley's burgeoning hardware startup revolution, right from the hub of where the software renaissance began.

The lab itself, like the companies it serves, is in the early stages. Klein and Conrad sit at a nondescript meeting table inside a garage they've repurposed into a drafty headquarters. It's more grunge than hip, with mismatched tables and cars parked feet away from a lounge area. There are no foosball tables or fancy decorations – or even perfectly painted walls, for that matter. But if location is everything, at the very least it has the right ZIP code, tucked away on an alley of San Francisco's South of Market district, a neighborhood brimming with tech companies like Pinterest, Dropbox and Zynga – all software.

It is a temple to eclecticism. Inside, a hamburger-making robot resides next to a low-earth satellite that sits beside a tool to book parking places in the city. A connected sports watch made specifically for women and a robot platform for tablets sit close by. Dozens of consumer product packages – the iPhone 5 box and the Jawbone's clear casing amongst them – fill a drawer in a toolbox otherwise carrying drawers of screwdrivers and wrenches.

But if the office is (politely) less-than-polished, the three people on the Lemnos Labs team have brilliant backgrounds. Conrad graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering and served as an officer and engineer with the Air Force's Airborne Laser Program. His co-founder, Helen Zelman, is a fellow MIT mechanical engineering grad who brings the business and management skills. And Entrepreneur in Residence Klein has a resume loaded with hardware giants like Apple, Palm and Nokia. Lemnos' list of mentors is similarly impressive, with the likes of Basis COO and co-founder Bharat Vasan and former VP of Twitter Elad Gil. Aside from the office, it isn't terribly different in structure than what you might expect from any other startup accelerator, with one key difference: The entire focus is on hardware.

Hardware is far riskier than software. It takes upfront capital just to begin experimenting. You need to build prototype after prototype before you can go into production. A failed prototype can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. And even after the hardware is complete, you need to tackle software and face all of the same challenges that software startups face. Then there are all of the hardware-centric decisions to make along the way like manufacturing, packaging, logistics, regulatory compliance and reliability testing. It's easy to take a wrong turn.

The lab tries to walk entrepreneurs through these hardware-specific considerations – things that software companies wouldn't have to bother with. Will a product work if it's freezing outside? Will it work if it's hot outside? How durable is it? Can manufacturing scale up if the product is a hit?

"We've outlined what you need to have a hardware company that succeeds. We ask companies to rate themselves from 1 to 5 on all of these [criteria]," explains Conrad. "This makes sure that there are no 'gotchas' down the road, like the Jawbone Up's massive recall."

It's a bold claim, to be sure. But one way Lemnos tries to accomplish that is by grounding its incubator companies in market realities.

"You see the flexible TV and the OLED, and [companies] never tell you when they're going to ship it," says Klein. "We see some crazy stuff. We have to figure out, could we nurture it to bring into production?"

There's no magic formula for that. Conrad says that Lemnos just looks for the same qualities most other incubators do – the right people and solid core technology. Once inside the lab, Lemnos tries to get its resident companies talking to each other.

"As much as the companies are very different in terms of target markets, the underlying commonality is hardware," Klein said. "They can sit under one roof and they actually have 75 to 80 percent in common."

For example, NanoSatisfi, a startup that built a near-orbit satellite to let anyone take photos and conduct science experiments from space, was able to make its vacuum chamber so inexpensively because another Lemnos team at Revolve Robotics, which makes a tablet-holding robot for remote meetings, knew of a junkyard to buy leftover parts for pennies on the dollar.

The lab's successful graduates include Local Motion, a company that makes an internet-connected module that allows enterprises to manage a fleet of vehicles. It raised more than $1 million, and has been installed into Google's fleet of cars and bicycles. Blossom, a company that makes a highly anticipated coffee-brewing machine, has also moved out of the space. And NanoSatisfi is on its way out, after having raised $1.2 million.

Right now, Lemnos is the only one of its kind in Silicon Valley. But it already has company in HAXLR8R, a China-based hardware incubator focused on getting companies close to the factories, and Boston's newly opened Bolt. Conrad and Klein say they wouldn't be surprised to see many more hardware incubators open in the next two to five years, increasingly growing the hardware startup trend.

"If we believe our own story, this thing is going to be way bigger than Lemnos," Klein says. "At one time, the valley would generate one Apple every so often. What happens if you can generate 100 Apples in this revolution? That knowledge – how we learned at Apple – it gets passed down."

Klein draws a pyramid, with children at the bottom and the complete, finished hardware company at the top. In between, there's college and places like TechShop and, of course, incubators like Lemnos Labs. He writes "Apple x 100" at the top of the pyramid.

"This system takes that knowledge and it starts to flow and the system will generate something way bigger than it used to be. This will take a while, but it's already started," he says.

In a weekly status meeting with NanoSatisfi, Klein and Conrad sit with the company's CEO, Peter Platzer, to discuss the last week's accomplishments. (The company just won Demo Pit at Launch 2013.) Next, they talk engineering status and future goals. NanoSatisfi is just months away from launching its first satellite. As the men discuss NanoSatisifi's pending graduation, Platzer is clearly reluctant to say goodbye.

"For the next three years, I expect to come here every week," he says, laughing. "Literally, you guys are going to have to kick me out crawling and biting nails."