Ananda Impact Ventures has led Differential Bio’s EUR 2 million pre-seed funding round alongside ReGen Ventures, with participation from Carbon13, Climate Capital, Better Ventures, CDTM Ventures, and a strong roster of angel investors. Differential Bio is unlocking the potential of the industrial bioeconomy by revolutionising how biomanufacturing processes are optimised and scaled.
Transforming Biomanufacturing with AI-Driven Innovation
Differential Bio is building tools and solutions for the future of the bioeconomy. By integrating AI-driven virtual experimentation with cutting-edge science, Differential Bio is addressing one of the bioeconomy’s most pressing challenges: achieving scalability, precision, and cost-efficiency in biomanufacturing. In this way, Differential Bio lowers the threshold for a whole host of bio-based products to reach the market and accelerates a global transition toward a sustainable, green, and circular economy.
Industrial Biotech: Overcoming the scaling challenge
As industries transition from fossil-based to bio-based production, the bioeconomy faces a significant hurdle: how to scale biomanufacturing processes with the precision and predictability required to reach cost-parity with fossil-based processes. The traditional trial-and-error approach to bioprocess optimisation is labour-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. It requires extensive lab work to identify the right conditions for maximizing yield, quality, and cost-efficiency — an approach that struggles to keep pace with the rapidly growing demand for bio-based solutions. These inefficiencies in manual experimentation limit the scalability and market adoption of sustainable products.
Engineering and programming biology has vast industrial potential. Estimates suggest that 60% of physical inputs in industries ranging from food to textiles could eventually be produced biologically, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on finite resources. As the global demand for bio-based solutions is projected to drive a 10–20x increase in biomanufacturing capacity over the coming decades, the opportunity for tech-first solutions to disrupt an under-automated, under-digitised industry is huge. Differential Bio is poised to lead the charge, providing the solutions needed to scale biomanufacturing.
The Bioeconomy: a disruptive opportunity for impact
At Ananda, we are driven by the conviction that the bioeconomy is not only a critical area for impact, but also one of the most exciting growth opportunities of the next decade. Over the past year, we have explored the biomanufacturing space in depth, speaking with industry experts, researchers, and startups to identify transformative solutions with the potential to redefine sustainability at scale.
The team at Differential Bio views biology as a complex, yet intriguing, systems problem to solve. They leverage lab automation and high-throughput screening to generate large-scale proprietary datasets and use machine learning (ML) to understand from first principles how bioprocesses scale. Differential Bio package and productise this understanding into tooling software that can predict key outcomes such as biomass growth, metabolite expression, and cell viability. This allows clients to optimise bioprocesses virtually, significantly reducing the need for costly and time-consuming lab experiments.
Ultimately, Differential Bio’s vision is to transform the bioeconomy in the same way that computer-aided design (CAD) tools revolutionised the engineering industry and catalyse a new wave of impactful, category-leading companies.
Computation x Biology: our conviction in Differential Bio
Differential Bio stood out for their bold vision, systems-level thinking, and ability to see how the confluence of scientific excellence and cutting-edge computation can translate into industry-wide impact. Their data-first approach aligns perfectly with our thesis on the critical role of data-driven solutions in understanding and engineering biology. The team’s ability to repeatedly overdeliver on early milestones and attract interest from major players in the industry further strengthened our belief in their potential.
Bernd Klosterkemper, Partner at Ananda Impact Ventures, recounts that “the Differential Bio founding team immediately stood out to us as having a perfect blend of technical and scientific excellence, strong commercial drive, and impact-centric values. 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.”
The visionary team
CEO, Christian Spier, brings years of commercial experience building and scaling companies, having led the US expansion of Y42 (Insight, Atomico) and driven European growth at Dialogue (IPO). With a background in bioinformatics and a significant biotech angel portfolio, Christian is well-positioned to lead the team in realizing their vision at the intersection of biology and business. CTO, Martin Patz, is the driving force behind Differential Bio’s AI and technology platform. With extensive experience leading model and chip development at Recogni, Martin understands how tech-first businesses scale rapidly and knows what it takes — both technically and culturally — to build industry-leading companies. Joining Martin and Christian in the C-suite, Dong Zhao, CSO, heads up the biology side of Differential Bio’s platform. Previously co-founder of Nosh.Bio, Dong has seen firsthand how to translate biological science into commercial products, bringing years of expertise in optimizing bioprocesses and scaling high-throughput data generation. Together, the Differential Bio team bridges the translational gap between science and industry and can realise the disruptive impact potential of bioprocess optimization.
In the coming decade, Differential Bio is set to play a pivotal role in unlocking the bioeconomy’s true potential. Together, we aim to scale their technology platform, drive down the costs of bioprocessing, and expand the reach of sustainable, bio-based products globally.
We are proud to support Differential Bio on this journey and look forward to partnering with them to transform the future of biomanufacturing.