Italian neo-industrial company Arsenale Bioyards has secured $10 million in seed funding from Planet A and byFounders to advance its AI-driven bio-manufacturing platform, aiming to cut costs by 90% and scale sustainable alternatives through precision fermentation.
- Founded in 2023 by Matteo Zanotto, Gordana Djordjevic, Massimo Portincaso, Niels Agerbaek, and Arnaud Legris, Arsenale Bioyards develops an end-to-end platform for biomanufacturing.
- The company integrates advanced hardware, AI-driven software, and precision fermentation to offer a more efficient and scalable solution for producing bio-based alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-derived products.
- Arsenale operates a pilot site with a 1,000L precision fermentation capacity, including 500L bioreactors and industry-first sensing technology. This infrastructure enables the transition from lab to industrial scale, using real-time data and AI to optimize performance, reduce experiments, and speed up production.
- The startup claims that its platform reduces production costs by up to 90%, enabling rapid scaling across industries like food, cosmetics, and materials.
Details of the deal
- The seed round was led by Planet A, a Berlin-based VC supporting European green tech startups, and Danish VC byFounders. CDP Ventures, Acequia Capital, Plug and Play, Grey Silo Ventures, and industrial family offices also participated in the round.
"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," claims Christoph Gras, co-founder and General Partner at Planet A Ventures.
- Arsenale will use the $10 million to scale its infrastructure, expand commercialization in food and cosmetics, and enhance its AI-driven precision fermentation platform. The funding will accelerate the transition from pilot to industrial-scale production, making sustainable biomanufacturing more cost-effective and widely accessible.
"Arsenale is not only imagining the bio-economy of the future—we are building it today, with operational facilities and proprietary technology. This funding reinforces our ability to drive measurable change and underscores our aspiration to build a new generative, biology-driven industrial paradigm," CEO and co-founder of Arsenale Bioyards, Massimo Portincaso, commented.
