ReGen 🤝 Differential Bio
The bioeconomy is the future, but scaling-up is the bottleneck. Differential Bio is building the infrastructure to break it.
ReGen Ventures is thrilled to have co-led Differential Bio’s €2M Pre-Seed round alongside Ananda Impact Ventures, backing their ambitious mission to build the foundation model for microbial life.
Biology is the most powerful manufacturing system on Earth.
It assembles molecules with atomic precision, weaves proteins into the fabric of life, and has been scaling itself flawlessly for billions of years. Yet our attempts to harness it for industrial production—food, medicine, materials—remain crude, expensive, and unpredictable.
Even the most advanced synthetic biology companies are constrained by the same fundamental problem: we do not yet have the tools to model and control biology at scale.
The history of industrial progress is a story of moving from tools to infrastructure. Manufacturing, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals didn’t just iterate on existing processes—they built the foundational models that made those processes predictable, scalable, and inevitable. Biomanufacturing is now at this transition point.
For decades, the field has been dominated by strain engineering, the fine-tuning of microbial genomes for production efficiency. But a microbe is only as effective as the environment in which it operates. Strains that thrive in a lab often collapse in industrial bioreactors due to oxygen limitations, nutrient fluctuations, and genetic drift. The problem isn’t just designing better microbes—it’s predicting and controlling how they behave at scale.
Biomanufacturing today is stuck in an expensive, failure-ridden cycle of trial-and-error. Scaling a single microbial process takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and is riddled with failure. Lanzatech for example – one of the few true success stories of next-gen fermentation at scale – took $200M and 13 years to commercialise just one product.
For all its promise, biomanufacturing remains an art more than a science.
A Foundation Model for Microbial Life
Differential Bio is building the first digital twin for microbial life—an in-silico model that fuses high-throughput phenotypic data with metabolic simulations, making biology predictable, programmable, and commercially scalable.
Instead of optimising strains in isolation, Differential Bio’s models account for the full system—how microbes interact with dynamic process conditions, feedstocks, and environmental variability. This allows bio-manufacturers to test, refine, and scale fermentation virtually before committing to large-scale production.
The team is starting with a Virtual Scale-up Platform, which integrates:
Miniaturised fermentation to replicate industrial conditions at high throughput.
Robotics and automation to generate high-resolution, real-world data.
AI-driven modeling to simulate, refine, and optimize bioprocesses in-silico.
By eliminating reliance on costly physical experiments, Differential Bio delivers precise insights into biomass growth rates, metabolite production, and cell viability, shifting biology from reactive optimization to predictive design.
The result: faster iteration cycles, significant cost reductions, and more stable, high-yield fermentation processes.
These digital twins do not remain static—they continuously evolve, accumulating real-world data and growing in intelligence. Over time, they become more than models; they become living, adaptive infrastructure capable of fine-tuning across strains, facilities, and products — an extension of the bioeconomy itself.
This is how microbial fermentation moves from an experimental discipline to a computational one; from an unpredictable process to a programmable platform.
The Visionaries
Differential Bio is led by a team with deep expertise in AI, automation, and microbial modeling—building not just a product, but an entirely new way of scaling biology.
Commercial co-founder Christian Spier drives the company’s partnership strategy, drawing from his experience scaling venture-backed companies to ensure Differential’s models embed deeply into industry workflows. Dr Dong Zhao, scientific co-founder, brings extensive commercial research experience in microbial fermentation and high-throughput screening. She developed the predictive biological models that form the scientific backbone of Differential’s digital twins. Martin Patz, Differential’s technical co-founder, has built and scaled autonomous systems at Recogni, and will be leading the development of machine learning-driven lab automation that enables the platform’s continuous improvement.
Together, they are building the computational backbone that will define the future of applying BioAI to regenerative manufacturing.
An inflection point for the bioeconomy
For the first time, advances in high-throughput experimentation, machine learning, and non-destructive phenotypic data collection have made scalable, cost-effective modelling of microbial systems possible.
At the same time, economic pressure is accelerating adoption.
The fragility of traditional supply chains is now impossible to ignore—skyrocketing cocoa prices, egg shortages, and regulatory bans on synthetic dyes have all exposed the limitations of legacy production systems. Meanwhile, rising feedstock prices and operational costs are making existing trial-and-error biomanufacturing methods unsustainable.
High-profile failures in second-generation bioethanol plants and other fermentation ventures have proven that companies need better tools to de-risk scale-up.
Differential Bio is arriving at exactly the right moment to capitalise on these conditions. By providing the missing computational layer for biomanufacturing, they are making it possible to scale microbial fermentation efficiently, affordably, and predictably—unlocking the full potential of the bioeconomy.
Why We Invested
The winners in industrial biotech will not be the companies that merely improve biological production, but those that own the data, the models, and the predictive layer that builds the basis for biology as a programmable discipline.
Differential Bio is solving this problem at the foundation. They are not just building tools—they are creating the infrastructure that will underpin the entire field.
Biomanufacturing will be the defining manufacturing platform of the next century. That’s why we’re backing Differential Bio to build a computational backbone with intelligence that rivals the complexity and emergence of life itself.
Join the Future of the BioEconomy:
Read more about what the team is building in AgFunder News and explore open roles here.