Biomanufacturing is undergoing a transformation as global disruptions, such as rising cocoa prices, egg shortages, and bans on synthetic dyes, highlight the fragility of traditional production systems. Leveraging biological systems such as microbial cells, biomanufacturing offers sustainable alternatives. However, scaling these processes remains a challenge due to high costs and slow progression.
Munich-based Differential Bio is transforming biomanufacturing through its Virtual Scale-up Platform, which combines advanced microbiology, robotics, and AI to optimise bioprocesses. By automating lab workflows and simulating bioprocesses virtually, the platform eliminates bottlenecks, ensuring faster and more scalable industrial processes.
In a recent development, Differential Bio has picked up €2 million in pre-seed funding and emerged from stealth. The investment was led by Ananda Impact Ventures and ReGen Ventures with participation from Carbon13, Climate Capital, Better Ventures, CDTM Ventures, alongside a prominent group of angel investors.
With fresh funding, Differential Bio is advancing its ambitious roadmap. This includes platform expansion (tackling complex bioprocesses, from multi-strain systems to novel bio-products), self-driving lab growth (enhancing AI models through richer datasets and automation), and team expansion (recruiting talent in bioinformatics, bioprocess engineering, and automation), and client partnerships (onboarding clients in high-growth sectors like food, cosmetics, and specialty chemicals to optimise processes and drive sustainability.
How Differential Bio transforms probiotic production
Differential Bio was founded in 2023 by Christian Spier, Martin Patz, and Dong Zhao in Munich. They bring a unique blend of expertise in business, technology, and biological science. The CEO Spier has a background in bioinformatics and a track record of scaling companies like Y42 and Dialogue. Patz, the CTO is an expert in AI and technology development with experience at Recogni.
The scientific visionary is co-founder and CSO Dong Zhao. She brings deep expertise in fungi fermentation, high-throughput screening, and scalable bioprocessing. Before co-founding Differential Bio, Dong was a scientist at Mushlabs and co-founded Nosh.bio in 2022, a Berlin-based startup that produces functional food ingredients from natural fungi biomass. As a former co-founder of Nosh.Bio, Dong’s experience in bioprocess optimisation and data generation drives Differential’s biological innovations. Her work at Nosh.bio focused on developing a sustainable bioprocess to produce nutritive food proteins, laying the foundation for her current role.
The company’s technology has already demonstrated remarkable success. In the probiotics sector, the company tackled the challenge of transitioning a microbial strain from an animal-based to a plant-based growth medium while maintaining performance. Using its Virtual Scale-up Platform, Differential Bio achieved a fourfold increase in biomass yield and reduced production costs by 16%, significantly improving production efficiency and sustainability.
This achievement showcases the platform’s ability to address the notorious “scale-up problem” in biomanufacturing, where transitioning from laboratory to industrial scale often leads to significant technical hurdles.
Can it disrupt the future of sustainable production?
Experts estimate that up to 60% of physical inputs across industries like food, cosmetics, and chemicals could eventually be manufactured biologically. As global biomanufacturing capacity is projected to grow 10-20x over the next few decades, Differential Bio is well-positioned to lead this transformation. By eliminating critical bottlenecks and enabling faster, smarter, and more scalable solutions, the company is paving the way for a sustainable future in multiple industries. With AI-driven optimisation and enhanced bioprocess efficiency, the company can be a leader in the rapidly evolving biomanufacturing sector.
What makes Differential Bio’s Virtual Scale-up Platform particularly innovative is its approach to this well-documented problem. By combining AI simulation with physical automation, the platform can predict how laboratory-scale processes will behave at the industrial scale, addressing the fundamental challenge that parameters never exactly duplicate across scales
“Biomanufacturing holds the key to a regenerative future, but scaling these processes remains a major bottleneck for the industry” said Christian Spier, CEO of Differential Bio, reflecting on the average 5-10 years and $100-500m it takes to develop novel bioproducts, “but we are here to change that, empowering biomanufacturers with cutting-edge tools to slash development timelines and costs, bringing bio-based products to market faster than ever before”.
“This project showcased the platform’s ability to handle multi-objective optimizations,” CSO Dong Zhao explained. “We proved that sustainable biomanufacturing can enhance performance and cut costs simultaneously — no compromises required.”
“Our ultimate goal is to make biomanufacturing as seamless and scalable as modern software development,” said Martin Patz, CTO. “This funding brings us closer to that vision, enabling us to deliver tangible value and reusable infrastructure to our clients.”
“The Differential team immediately stood out to us with their exceptional combination of deep technical expertise, innovative scientific approach, and a visionary drive to deliver impactful solutions at scale,” said Bernd Klosterkemper, Partner at Ananda Impact Ventures. “We believe their technology will redefine biomanufacturing by enabling faster, more efficient scaling of bio-based processes, accelerating the global transition to a sustainable, green, and circular economy.”
“Biomanufacturing is constrained by a scaling crisis. By leveraging machine learning on extensive phenotypic and bioprocess data, Differential can redefine biomanufacturing at scale by providing a step function reduction in cost and time to commercialization,” said Tom McQuillen, Partner at ReGen Ventures. “Chris, Dong and Martin have a daring ambition to transform biomanufacturin,g and we feel honored to partner in the journey”.
The post Meet Dong Zhao: a co-founder of Munich-based Differential Bio that landed €2M for sustainable biomanufacturing appeared first on Tech Funding News.