Arsenale Bioyards aims to transform biomanufacturing with a proprietary end-to-end platform that integrates advanced hardware, AI-driven software, and precision fermentation. The Italian startup, which wants to bridge the gap between lab-scale innovation and industrial-scale production, plans to first target cosmetics and high-end foods with bio-based alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-derived products.
The company, which was recently named a 2025 World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer and a winner of a Norrsken Foundation Impact 100 award, says its approach will drastically reduce costs while also significantly shortening the timeline for industrial-scale adoption of sustainable products.
“Our mission is to make biomanufacturing economically viable, bringing down the cost and time by one order of magnitude,” says CEO and co-founder Massimo Portincaso. “We want to do what Henry Bessemer did in 1856 when he reduced the cost of producing steel from 40 pounds per ton to 6 pounds per ton.”
Through process and engineering innovation that slashed the cost Bessemer turned steel into the ubiquitous material of the industrial revolution. Arsenale Bioyards says it believes a 90% cost reduction will trigger a Bessemer moment for precision fermentation.
“Leveraging the potential of designing molecules at the atomic level with properties we can’t even imagine is the next frontier,” says Portincaso “The potential impact on sustainability is huge. We hope to be a driving force in the transition from animal sourced proteins and everything derived from petrochemicals.”
Arsenale Bioyards’ platform is a fully integrated biomanufacturing solution, weaving together hardware, data, and AI into a system that controls every step of the production value chain — from lab-scale organism-design to large-scale industrial production. This end-to-end integration ensures precision, scalability, and continuous learning, says Portincaso, creating an ecosystem where every component interacts to accelerate time-to-market and reduce risk. “This is why we aim at dramatically bringing down the cost of biomanufacturing,” he says.
Biomanufacturing leverages micro-organisms like yeast, bacteria, algae, fungi to produce molecules which are high-performance bio-alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-sourced products. Rather than breaking down resources, in an extractive fashion, it builds from the molecular level. Precision fermentation, one of the core technologies for bio-manufacturing, changes the genetic code of these organisms to achieve specific outcomes — from enzymes and other animal-sourced proteins to lipids, vitamins, biologics and biosimilars — without relying on traditional agriculture or fossil sources of carbon.
When unlocked at scale, precision fermentation has the potential to revolutionize production across industries. McKinsey estimates that 60% of the world physical inputs could be made using biological means. Boston Consulting Group projects that this has the potential to disrupt whole value chains, potentially impacting 40% of global GDP, equivalent to more than $30 trillion.
While the potential is immense the industry has so far not lived up to its own hype for a variety of reasons, says Portincaso.
For starters, he says the industry is built on the wrong foundation: biopharma, a low-volume, high-value, highly regulated industry, with expensive cost structures unsuited to industrial applications at scale. “Biopharma has been set up to produce products worth thousands if not tens of thousands of euros per gram whereas manufactures are designed to produce products at tens of euros per kilogram,” says Portincaso. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this is unlikely to work. What’s more with biopharma, all the value is in finding or defining the molecule, not in manufacturing, whereas in the industrial world manufacturing is where you make your money.”
Other things holding the industry back include:
- Laboratory focus and mindset: Value creation in biotech is lab-centric, small-scale and heavily academia-driven, making predicting organisms’ behavior and yields in industrial conditions almost impossible.
- Siloed steps: Fragmentation across design, scale-up, and manufacturing causes friction and inefficient processes, with high CAPEX and OPEX and a long time to market.
- Inconsistent, noisy, and limited data: This hinders learning both through statistical analysis and through the use of AI and machine learning — creating problems when scaling up production.
Arsenale Bioyards is taking a different approach. “Our goal is to shift all biomanufacturing from a scientific endeavor to an industrial endeavor,” says Portincaso.
The Italian startup says it is establishing the desired industrial context and conditions from the start – in the lab. “We work in the lab under industrial conditions to guarantee that precision fermentation will work at scale,” he says. This removes the inefficiencies of scaling from laboratory models to large-scale production, cutting costs significantly compared to conventional contract manufacturing approaches, he says.
Arsenale Bioyards is additionally using the power of AI to discover process solutions that nature has already found which are not visible to the naked eye rather than randomly testing hundreds of thousands of options. By redefining industrial biotech with a software-first approach and leveraging AI-driven process optimization, Arsenale says it can help businesses to move from concept to industrial production in a fraction of the time. Compared to traditional biomanufacturing that takes years to scale, Arsenale’s infrastructure reduces development cycles and allows rapid iteration, ensuring faster market entry, Porincaso says.
Another strength is that Arsenale Bioyards’ proprietary biomanufacturing platform harnesses extensive real-time monitoring and AI-driven insights to capture orders of magnitude more process data than standard bioreactors. The cross-disciplinary nature of the founding team – Portincaso, Gordana Djordjevic, Niels Agerbaek, Matteo Zanotto, and Arnaud Legris, – is another plus, Portincaso says. It brings together expertise across engineering, biotech, AI, and scaling industrial technologies.
In under 12 months, Arsenale has set up a fully functional pilot facility in Pordenone, Italy. It has two batteries of operating Piccolo microbioreactors, two operating 500L Magnum bioreactors with superior sensing capabilities and is integrating its modular and scalable Design@Scale approach to enable designing in industrial conditions.
The one-year-old company has raised a total of €10 million and expects to have its first commercial facility, with a 10,000 liters capacity, and its first bio data center, with 500+ microbioreactors, operational in northern Italy by 2027. The goal is to eventually have the first fully commercial facility by by 2029, in northern Italy.
Competitors include Caladan In the US for microbioreactors, Cauldron in Australia, and Liberation Bioindustries, a U.S. company in the late stages of constructing its first commercial-scale, purpose-built, precision fermentation biomanufacturing facility with a capacity of 600,000 liters and a fully dedicated downstream process.
“While there is currently a focus on continuous fermentation,” says Portincaso, “We think that is an important outcome but not an objective, because we believe our sensing capabilities and Design@Scale will eventually get us there.” He says Arsenele Bioyards’ differentiators are its focus on getting to industrial scale and reducing time to market and cost; an end-to-end system that vertically integrates the industrial process, micro bioreactors and software; and that the company is technology agnostic, meaning it can embed the latest and best tech.
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