Milan-based Arsenale Bioyards, a neo-industrial company focused on innovating scalable biomanufacturing, has announced the successful closure of its first €9.5 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.
“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.”
Founded in 2023 by Massimo Portincaso, Gordana Djordjevic, Niels Agerbaek, Matteo Zanotto, 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.
The cross-disciplinary nature of the founding team brings together expertise across engineering, biotech, AI, and scaling industrial technologies.
Designed to bridge the gap from lab-scale innovation to industrial-scale production, Arsenale enables industries like food, chemicals, and materials to develop and scale bio-based alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-derived products.
The funding supports Arsenale’s mission to transform the €191 billion biomanufacturing market while driving a new industrial trajectory towards a sustainable, biology-driven future.
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 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.
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. By designing its own bioreactors, Arsenale ensures seamless integration with AI models, enabling faster, standardised, and cost-effective production.
Arsenale’s approach skips “unnecessary” lab experiments, reduces OPEX and CAPEX, and accelerates time to market through automation and process design.
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.
The financing will support the expansion of Arsenale’s infrastructure, accelerating its commercialisation roadmap in the food and cosmetics industries while increasing its role in the neo-industrial era—a movement driven by sustainability and innovation.
