Italian company Arsenale Bioyards has announced the successful closure of its first $10m seed financing round.
The funding supports Arsenale’s mission to transform the $200bn biomanufacturing market while driving a new industrial trajectory towards a sustainable, biology-driven future. Arsenale’s platform combines lab and industrial-scale bioreactors with AI-driven software, optimising fermentation processes and increasing the speed of scaling from lab to industrial scale.
Arsenale’s neo-industrial approach draws on nature to enable more efficient, circular manufacturing practices. Precision fermentation, which uses microorganisms like yeast or bacteria to produce proteins and other valuable compounds, can be hindered by high costs. Arsenale’s proprietary and first-of-its-kind end-to-end platform aims at drastically reducing costs and time—by up to 90%—and accelerating the adoption of sustainable bio-based alternatives. Core to this are the Bioyards, modular batteries of industrial bio-reactors that enable cost-effective scaling-out compared to the common practice of scaling up.
Data-driven approach
Arsenale’s data-first approach collects and processes real-time data to guide experiment design and predict large-scale performance. This enables optimised bioreactor control. Designing its own bioreactors allowed for integration with AI models, enabling faster, standardised, and cost-effective production. Unlike traditional trial-and-error methods, its approach skips unnecessary lab experiments, reduces OPEX and CAPEX, and accelerates time to market through automation and process design.
“Arsenale is not only imagining the bio-economy of the future—we are building it today, with operational facilities and proprietary technology,” said Massimo Portincaso, CEO and co-founder of Arsenale Bioyards.
“This funding reinforces our ability to drive measurable change and underscores our aspiration to build a new generative, biology-driven industrial paradigm.”
The financing will support the expansion of Arsenale’s infrastructure, accelerating its commercialisation roadmap in the food and cosmetics industries while advancing its role as a cornerstone of the neo-industrial era—a movement driven by sustainability and innovation.
Arsenale operates a fully-functioning pilot site equipped with 1,000L precision fermentation capacity, including two advanced 500L bioreactors and a suite of batteries of smaller precision fermentation bioreactors with industry-first sensing capabilities. This operational infrastructure lays the foundation for Arsenale’s ability to scale from lab to industry and highlights its readiness to meet the growing demand for sustainable biomanufacturing solutions.
The funding round was led by Planet A and by founders with participation from CDP Ventures, Acequia Capital, Plug N Play, Grey Silo Ventures as well as industrial family offices.
