Italy’s Arsenale Bioyards raises €9.5M to make biomanufacturing economically viable: Here’s how

Pordenone, Italy-based Arsenale Bioyards, a neo-industrial company transforming scalable biomanufacturing, has secured its first $10M (approximately €9.5M) in a 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. 

Based out of Berlin, Planet A is a venture capital fund supporting European green tech startups that have a significant positive impact on our planet.

“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 standardised, Arsenale turns biomanufacturing into an investable asset class while enabling industries to move away from animal- and petrochemical-derived products at scale,” says Christoph Gras, Co-Founder & General Partner, Planet A Ventures.

Fund utilisation

The company will use the funds to support its infrastructure expansion and accelerate its commercialisation roadmap in the food and cosmetics industries.

The company’s platform combines advanced lab and industrial-scale bioreactors with AI-driven software, optimising fermentation processes and increasing the speed of scaling from lab to industrial scale. 

“This funding reinforces our ability to drive measurable change and underscores our aspiration to build a new generative, biology-driven industrial paradigm,” says Massimo Portincaso, CEO and Co-Founder of Arsenale Bioyards.

Arsenale: Transforming bio-manufacturing

Founded by Matteo Zanotto, Gordana Djordjevic, Massimo Portincaso, Niels Agerbaek, and Arnaud Legris, Arsenale is transforming bio-manufacturing with a proprietary end-to-end platform that integrates advanced hardware, AI-driven software, and precision fermentation.

Precision Fermentation is a technology used in biomanufacturing that employs microorganisms like yeast or bacteria to create proteins and other valuable compounds.

While it’s widely used in pharmaceuticals, its use in food and cosmetics is often limited by high costs.

The Italian company has developed a unique platform that aims to reduce these costs and production times by up to 90 per cent.

This will help promote the use of sustainable bio-based products.

At the heart of this platform are Bioyards—modular systems of industrial bioreactors that make it easier to increase production efficiently, rather than just making larger facilities.

The company connects lab innovations to large-scale production, helping industries like food, chemicals, and materials create eco-friendly alternatives to petrochemicals and animal products.

By working together with nature, Arsenale aims to cut costs by up to 90 per cent and speed up the adoption of sustainable products. 

Currently, the Italian company 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.

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.

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, claims the company.

“Arsenale is not only imagining the bio-economy of the future—we are building it today, with operational facilities and proprietary technology,” says Portincaso.