Why We Invested in Arsenale

Biomanufacturing — the industry of the nature

The most efficient factories in the world are the cells that make up life. They have the capacity to create almost any molecule we know of using extremely simple inputs—CO₂, sugar, and sometimes light. In the coming decades, cells will increasingly be used to produce a significant share of the materials, food ingredients, enzymes, and chemicals we rely on. This is what we call biomanufacturing.

Biomanufacturing has the potential to slash CO₂ emissions from production by up to 90% and unlock a $200b in demand across a vast range of outputs, requiring a 20-fold increase in capacity – and up to 2.4 billion liters in capacity by 2040.

The first and simplest way to leverage cells for production is precision fermentation, which allows cells to produce specific molecules with high precision. However, despite its potential, the industry faces significant scaling challenges. Processes that work in the lab often fail under industrial conditions, and the high costs associated with biopharma-style production, along with fragmentation across lab and scale-up stages, have made large-scale deployment prohibitively expensive.

Enter Arsenale

Arsenale tackles these challenges head-on with a fully integrated biomanufacturing platform that unifies hardware, data, and AI under one roof.

Instead of brute-forcing nature through classic (often patchwork) approaches, Arsenale’s micro-reactors (the “Piccolo”) replicate industrial conditions at the benchtop. Their AI-powered “Design@Scale” AI model analyzes real-time data flowing from those reactors, optimizing organisms and processes in parallel. All of this seamlessly connects to the large-scale “BioYard” reactors, enabling customers to go from lab to industrial production on a continuous, learning-first trajectory—a radical departure from today’s disjointed pipelines.

Why Now?

1. The Technology is ready: Advances in AI, automation and sensing technology have reached a point where industrial biology can effectively use massive volumes of high-fidelity data. This allows much faster and cheaper experimentation and iteration.
2. The Market needs this: Consumers, companies, and governments are demanding cleaner and cheaper alternatives to petrochemicals and animal-sourced products. Biomanufacturing stands out as a versatile, planet-positive avenue for transforming the world’s physical inputs.‍
3. Biomanufacturing needs a reset: The first-generation of biomanufacturing companies failed to reach their ambitions due to scale-up challenges and expensive, custom-built infrastructure. Arsenale has rethought this from first principles and developed a standardized, modular, and scalable platform that enables the efficient and flexible use of biology, making commercial-scale production possible.

Why we’re Excited

Not only is this team incredibly experienced in a vast breadth of fields, but we are continuously blown away by their execution capacity and speed. Massimo possesses a rare combination of extraordinary ambition, long-term vision, relentless execution, and a keen eye for talent.

When we first met Massimo in 2023, right after founding the company and raising a pre-seed, he had plans that were so ambitious that we were not sure they were possible. 9 months later, not only had they accomplished everything they promised, but they had gone far above and beyond.

What also excites us is how Arsenale’s approach recasts the relationship between nature and technology. By “co-designing” with biology—rather than trying to force or retrofit it—Arsenale is unlocking productivity gains by being radically vertically integrated. Their fractal learning loop ensures that every experiment, whether in a 50 mL micro-reactor or a 50,000 L “Goliath,” informs the next iteration.

Arsenale is posititioned to redefine biomanufacturing: pushing costs down, accelerating time-to-market, and offering a new model where data, hardware, and biology evolve together in a continuous feedback cycle.

Backed by a mission-driven team, a future-proof technical strategy, and a clear path to commercial adoption, Arsenale is poised to truly deliver on the promise of industrial biology—and we’re thrilled to be on this journey alongside them.

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