Biomanufacturing in the Neo-Industrial Age.
Rebuilding Industry from Intelligence and Nature.
An essay by Massimo Portincaso
Prelude
While it has been a while since I have published something, the work we have been doing with Arsenale has pushed my thinking about deep-tech and its impact significantly.
In essence, what I wrote back in 2021 on deep-tech and nature co-design continues to hold true, but requires an important follow-up in terms of implications on the industrial backbone as we know it.
Several years after publishing the work in 2021, there is still a lot of discussion about “what“ deep-tech is. For me personally, things have not changed, and – as I stated back then - deep-tech is not a technology, but rather an approach to innovation, and the implications of this new approach are quite profound and finally starting to surface in their full impact now.
The massive expansion of the option space, and the acceleration of the DBTL (Design Build Test Learn) cycle, which characterizes the deep-tech approach to innovation, were already foundational back then, but have now been put on steroids by the developments on the AI front. The consequence is that a radically different new industrial model is emerging, with extremely profound implications for the industrial world, even down to the organizational set up of companies.
This topic warrants a deep-dive, which will follow, in the meanwhile I wanted to focus on a subset of it, and start sharing my thoughts related to the industrial area in which Arsenale operates: biomanufacturing*.
Biomanufacturing is the industry of nature, meaning the industry that leverages nature as an industrial platform, by partnering with it. But it would be a mistake to look at what is happening in biomanufacturing as a stand alone phenomenon. In reality, biomanufacturing is part of a much broader development that, starting from the deep-tech approach to innovation, is redefining the industrial paradigm, in what at Arsenale we like to call the Neo-Industrial Age.
In fact, we are entering a new industrial era - one that is no longer built on steel, scale, or control. Instead, this new era is forged through intelligence, software, sensing, and – for biomanufacturing – a renewed partnership with nature. This shift is more than technological; it is philosophical, architectural, and deeply systemic.
Biomanufacturing, and more in general the Neo-Industrial Age bring a fundamental rethink of how industry is conceived, built, and scaled. They challenge the 200-year-old industrial paradigm - one centered on physical infrastructure and mechanical dominance - and replacing it with a generative model: adaptive, intelligent, and – in the case of biomanufacturing, in rhythm with the complexity of nature.
From Extraction to Generation: The End of the Old Industrial Order
Traditional industry was designed to extract, refine, and produce at scale. The physical world was segmented, simplified, and subdued in service of output. Infrastructure was rigid, optimization linear, and progress was defined by expansion.
But this model is no longer viable - ecologically, economically, or conceptually.
Biomanufacturing in the Neo-Industrial Age reorients this logic. It begins with intelligence, not hardware. Its tools are data, sensing, computation, and biological insight. Its infrastructure is modular, adaptable, and co-designed with the systems it inhabits. Its success is measured not by growth alone, but by learning, regeneration and resilience.
Similarly, other industries are undergoing, or will undergo, a fundamental reset, where instead of biological insights the core role will be played by other types of insight. The “what” might change, but the “how” is similar.
The Radical Inversion: Starting with Intelligence
At the core of biomanufacturing in the Neo-Industrial age is a radical inversion: we no longer begin with hardware and layer intelligence on top. Instead, we begin with intelligence—AI, algorithms, sensing systems—and allow that intelligence to shape the infrastructure. And this is true not only for biomanufacturing, but for all aspects and industries of the Neo-Industrial Age.
This inversion creates an entirely new kind of industrial stack. At Arsenale, our systems are born from data. Our biomanufacturing platform is not a lab scaling into a factory—it is an industrial system that learns from the start, co-evolving with the biology it works with.
Co-Designing with Nature
Perhaps the most radical—and most necessary—principle of biomanufacturing in the Neo-Industrial Age is this: we do not engineer nature. We co-design with it.
This marks a break from the techno-solutionism of the 20th century (and early 21st century). At Arsenale, we embrace complexity. We use design of experiments, contextual data, and sensing to understand how biological systems behave in industrial contexts—and we adapt our designs accordingly.
Nature is not a tool to be optimized. It is a system to be understood, respected, and integrated into our logic of creation.
Infrastructure as a Learning System
The old model of infrastructure was fixed and inert: factories, pipelines, and plants that executed predefined tasks. The Neo-Industrial Age demands a new type of infrastructure—one that is modular, distributed, and capable of learning.
At Arsenale, we are building this through precision fermentation systems that scale out, not up. Our software-first approach allows us to invert the strain-to-production dynamic and bring industrial conditions directly into the lab. This is structural coupling in practice: biology and context designed together.
Mastering the Full Stack
To build a truly neo-industrial system, we must master all layers of the value chain: it is not about one single technology operating as a “magic wand”, it is about integrating multiple technologies, end-to-end, advancing every aspect of the value chain, and making it capable of innovating at the pace of the deep tech approach to innovation.
In this new context, materials, sensors and data become the trifecta around which the new value chains are built. In the case of biomanufacturing, materials are the interface between biology and hardware. Sensing turns physical states into data. And data, processed by AI, becomes intelligence that guides design, optimization, and adaptation.
This full-stack approach is what makes the Neo-Industrial Age fundamentally different from digitalization. It is not an overlay—it is a rebuild from the ground up.
Energy as Technology, Not Commodity
A further fundamental shift in the Neo-Industrial Age is how energy is conceived . In the traditional paradigm, energy is a commodity: extracted, priced, consumed. In the Neo-Industrial Age, energy is a technology and a core component of the technological stack. It is programmable, contextual, and treated as infrastructure that must co-evolve with sensing, software, and process.
This change unlocks new ways of designing systems where energy usage is not an afterthought, but a core component of efficiency, sustainability, and performance. It also aligns with Arsenale’s goal to reduce the cost and impact of biomanufacturing infrastructure.
Parallel Infrastructures: Transitioning Without Collapse
The Neo-Industrial Age is not about sudden replacement, the world of hardware works on a different deployment timescale than software. It is about building new systems in parallel—gradually substituting the outdated, rigid infrastructure with something more resilient and efficient.
This is why our approach at Arsenale is deliberately modular and containerized. It enables a smoother transition for industries, providing real economic viability while unlocking long-term systemic change.
A New Kind of Progress
The Neo-Industrial Age redefines what progress means. No longer a race for speed or scale, progress is the ability to respond, adapt, and (re-)generate. It is measured by the quality of what is built, its systemic thoroughness and elegance, and the depth of learning embedded in every process.
At Arsenale, this is not an aspiration. It is an active practice.
A New Paradigm
The industrial revolution gave us machines, energy, and mass production. The Neo-Industrial Age gives us intelligence, resilience and continuous adaptation.
It is not a correction of the past — it is a new paradigm for the future. And it begins, as all paradigm shifts do, by rethinking everything we assumed to be fixed.
At Arsenale, we are not building the future of industry. We are building its replacement.
*To be precise, with Arsenale we are only working on a subset of biomanufacturing, namely precision fermentation, with the other components of biomanufacturing being biomass fermentation, cellular agriculture, and molecular farming.