Arsenale CEO and Co-Founder, Massimo Portincaso, speaks at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of New Champions in Dalian, China on what it will take for biomanufacturing to achieve cost-competitive, global scale.

Italy has a paradox. The country produces world-class cleantech innovation, trains excellent researchers, generates startups that attract international capital, and then watches as that same innovation is industrialised in Germany, France, or Asia. On 18 June 2026, a cross-party parliamentary alliance was born to break that pattern. Massimo Portincaso was among the founders who took the floor.

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and now at the helm of Block, published an essay in Sequoia Capital’s magazine with an observation that deserves attention in every Italian boardroom. Corporate hierarchy, Dorsey reminded readers, is a technology. Not a law of nature, not an organisational necessity. A technology, invented two thousand years ago by the Roman army to solve a concrete problem: how to coordinate thousands of people across enormous distances when information travels at the speed of a horse.

New financial instruments need to be developed to support innovative manufacturing. "There are no off-the-shelf solutions, but it is strategic to start building them now." Europe's industrial autonomy is at stake.

The Pordenone-based startup is accelerating its growth thanks to a multi-million euro capital increase. It now plans to connect with Veneto universities and industries.

Despite the massive improvements in scale-up enabled by single-use bioreactors and a scale-out philosophy, going from process development scale to larger bioreactors remains tricky.

Based in Pordenone, Arsenale Bioyards, a startup that wants to reduce the costs of a process to obtain organic alternatives to petrochemicals from yeasts and funghi.

L’azienda di Pordenone ha appena concluso un aumento di capitale per 10 milioni di euro, guidato da Cdp. Con la sua piattaforma end to end riprogramma geneticamente batteri e lieviti per trasformarli in strumenti di produzione di insulina, lattoferrina, collegene.

Arsenale Bioyards, azienda che vuole trasformare il mercate del bio-manufacturing, ha annunciato la chiusura del suo primo round di investimento seed da 10 milioni di euro

On August 9th, 2023, the synthetic biology pioneer Amyris announced its voluntary filing for Chapter 11/Bankruptcy. I think this is a very important moment for the industry as it officially sanctions the end of an era, and (I hope) the beginning of a new one for the industry, and more in general for the transition of our industrial backbone from an exploitative to generative paradigm.

Not so long ago, the technology startup landscape in Europe was sparsely populated, especially when compared with other tech-rich regions of the world.

Corporates are sitting on a wealth of resources (not only financial) that could help European deeptech companies scale

There’s another industrial revolution forming, and it promises to be at least as far reaching as the ones before it.

Leaders will need to be resilient, open-minded, and creative. Poetry can show them the way.

Typically developed by startups (often university spinoffs), deep technologies are notable for their novelty and potential impact, for the time and scale needed to develop them, and for the level of financing required to move from laboratory science to viable commercial product.

It is nothing new that fundamental diversity is beneficial, economically and socially.