Arsenale Bioyards Raises $10M to Cut Biomanufacturing Costs by 90% with First-of-its-Kind end-to-end Platform
Pordenone, February 25, 2025 –Arsenale Bioyards, a neo-industrial company fundamentally redefining scalable biomanufacturing, has announced the successful closure of its first $10 million seed financing round. The round was led by Planet A and byFounders with participation from CDP Ventures, Acequia Capital, Plug N Play, Grey Silo Ventures as well as industrial family offices.
The funding supports Arsenale's mission to transform the $200 billion biomanufacturing market while driving a new industrial trajectory towards a sustainable, biology-driven future. Arsenale's platform combines advanced lab and industrial-scale bioreactors with AI-driven software, optimizing fermentation processes and increasing the speed of scaling from lab to industrial scale.
Neo-Industrial Biomanufacturing: Co-Designing with Nature
Arsenale’s neo-industrial approach draws on nature’s principles to enable more efficient, circular manufacturing practices. Through Precision Fermentation — a key technology in biomanufacturing— which uses microorganisms like yeast or bacteria to produce proteins and other valuable compounds. Although commonly used in pharmaceuticals, Precision Fermentation’s application in industries like food and cosmetics is 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 vs. the common practice of scaling up.
"At Planet A, we saw Arsenale’s potential early on—this is a fundamental rethink of how biomanufacturing scales. By making production cost-competitive and standardized, Arsenale turns biomanufacturing into an investable asset class while enabling industries to move away from animal- and petrochemical-derived products at scale," said Christoph Gras, Co-Founder & General Partner, Planet A Ventures.
A Data-Driven Approach to Transformation
Arsenale’s data-first approach collects and processes real-time data to guide experiment design and predict large-scale performance. This enables optimized bioreactor control. By designing its own bioreactors, Arsenale ensures seamless integration with AI models, enabling faster, standardized, 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 commercialization 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 cross-disciplinary nature of the founding team brings together deep expertise across engineering, biotech, AI, and scaling industrial technologies. CEO Massimo Portincaso, former BCG Partner and MD, is a thought leader in the space who combines a bold vision for the future of biomanufacturing with hands-on entrepreneurial experience after successfully co-founding and exiting Officinae Bio.
ARSENALE Founders – Matteo Zanotto, Gordana Djordjevic, Massimo Portincaso, Niels Agerbaek, Arnaud Legris
CSO Gordana Djordjevic brings 25+ years of scientific leadership at Perfect Day, Zymergen, Synthetic Genomics, BP and BASF, where she built the expertise needed to overcome the barriers of industrial precision fermentation and scale it beyond Pharma.
Niels Lynge Agerbæk, former VP at Zymergen, GM at Xellia Pharmaceuticals US, and Director at Novo Nordisk is leading technical implementation as CTO. CIO Matteo Zanotto, a PhD in AI and deep learning, drives Arsenale’s software and algorithmic innovation, while COO Arnaud Legris, an engineer and former BCG consultant, ensures seamless operational execution.
About Arsenale Bioyards
Arsenale is transforming bio-manufacturing with a proprietary end-to-end platform that integrates advanced hardware, AI-driven software, and precision fermentation. Designed to bridge the gap from lab-scale innovation to industrial-scale production, Arsenale enables industries like food, chemicals, and materials to seamlessly develop and scale bio-based alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-derived products. By empowering companies to co-design with nature, Arsenale aims to drastically reduce costs by up to 90% while also significantly shortening the timeline for industrial-scale adoption of sustainable products. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, with operations in Pordenone and the US, Arsenale is building the industrial backbone of the bio-economy.
Learn more at arsenale.bio.
Enquiries
Arsenale Bioyards s.r.l. nicole(at)arsenale.bio