By 2040, the biomanufacturing market for the chemical and food industries could reach $200 billion. The potential is there, but the challenge remains in production capacity. Currently, using microorganisms like yeast, bacteria, algae, and fungi to create bio-based alternatives to petrochemical and animal-derived products is limited to the pharmaceutical industry. This is because only pharma can afford the high costs of producing substances priced at up to €10,000 per gram.

In Pordenone, Italy, Arsenale Bioyards is working to change this. The company aims to "enable the future" by offering an integrated end-to-end platform that allows users to easily design new bio-molecules. It then produces these molecules in its labs, ensuring they meet specific user needs and can be scaled to industrial production levels.

Arsenale Bioyards believes this approach can make biomanufacturing economically accessible.

Traditionally, biomanufacturing starts in a laboratory and then attempts to scale up to industrial production, but this method has been unsuccessful. Arsenale Bioyards takes a different approach by bringing industrial conditions into the lab. This allows biologists to work in conditions already suitable for large-scale production, ensuring that the molecules created are suitable for industrial use. The company leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and a team of 23 experts in AI, biology, and engineering, including some who returned from abroad and others from Silicon Valley.

One of the first sectors the company plans to target with its "scale out" approach (as opposed to the traditional "scale up") is the food industry. Processes for making wine, cheese, and other products could be “containerized” using micro-bioreactors, drastically lowering costs compared to pharmaceutical methods. Arsenale Bioyards plans to begin production in late 2026 or early 2027. Future customers will not need to make space for large bioreactors or even the company’s small ones; instead, they will integrate the platform into their existing systems and begin imagining the bio-organisms they might need.

The next step for Arsenale Bioyards is to move into the cosmetics sector.