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Arsenale BioYards: Massimo Portincaso shares how to get funded in 2025

Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 

In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2025 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.

Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners; Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.

Episode 26: Arsenale BioYards: Massimo Portincaso shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, I sat down with Massimo Portincaso, CEO and co-founder of Arsenale BioYards, who just raised a €10M seed round to tackle one of biotech’s toughest challenges: making biomanufacturing economically viable at scale. Massimo breaks down how his team is redesigning the scale-up process from the ground up—bringing industrial conditions into the lab, leveraging smart cap table construction, and tapping into project finance to build infrastructure without drowning in dilution. This conversation is a masterclass in turning big vision into executable industrial strategy, and a rare peek into how deeptech founders can blend science, storytelling, and stoic leadership to win over top-tier VCs.

Key Facts Arsenale BioYards:

• Goal: To make biomanufacturing economically viable by reducing its cost by an order of magnitude.
• Recently raised a 10 million round co-led by Planet A and By Founders.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Solve for Scale Early — Biotech is Infrastructure-Heavy. Instead of classical scale-up, Arsenale uses scale-out: standardized 50,000L bioreactor modules for rapid deployment and learning curve economics. "What we're doing on the industrial side is that we're not doing the classical scale up as everybody else, but we're doing scale out. So we manage to do what we're doing by identifying one size, which will be around 50,000 liters, containerize it, and then if you need more capacity, we simply build more bioreactor."
2. Convince VCs You’re More Than Hardware. The business is more than pipes and tanks. It’s a data platform for smarter biomanufacturing with guaranteed scale-up success. "Our desk makes you smarter. You develop your processes that belong to you." "We embed DSP from the get-go, because the cost of DSP is determined at the beginning."
3. Strategic Cap Tables Are Built, Not Hoped For. Massimo curated a cap table of US and EU institutional VCs, vertical farming founders, industrial family offices, and bioindustry operators. "I wanted smart money—family offices, industrial know-how, and institutional money together."