Ayana Bio and Brevel net $1.25M BIRD grant to test illuminated fermentation for plant cell culture
What's the deal? US startup Ayana BioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Israeli startup BrevelDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → have secured a $1.25M grant from Israel's BIRD FoundationDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to explore whether Brevel's "illuminated fermentation" technology can boost plant cell culture production.
Ayana Bio, a 2021 spinoff from Ginkgo Bioworks, grows high-value botanicals from plant cell lines in bioreactors — an approach it says sidesteps supply chain headaches tied to traditional agriculture. Brevel, founded in 2016 by brothers Yonatan, Ido, and Matan Golan, pioneered a method combining sugar-based "dark" fermentation with LED lighting in a single process to grow chlorella biomass, proteins, and lipids at significantly higher yields.
The grant will fund research into whether adding light as a variable in Ayana Bio's fermentation tanks can improve plant cell growth and bioactive production.
Why now? Brevel has only recently developed scalable lighting that can be installed in — or retrofitted into — standard dark fermentation tanks. "We have avoided using light as one of the variables because there were no good options at scale to do that," said Ayana Bio chief executive officer Frank Jaksch. "Now that Brevel has been working on scalable lighting options for large tanks, we would like to explore the use of light as an additional variable."
Timing also aligns with rising demand for natural ingredients. Jaksch noted that recent MAHA activity — including a notice to reassess the safety of synthetic preservatives such as BHA — has driven "significant commercial traction" for sage-derived rosmarinic acid as a natural preservative alternative. Ayana Bio is on track to hit commercial scale for that product in 2026 and is finalising its first GRAS dossier for the FDA.
What could go wrong? Scale remains a formidable challenge. Jaksch said technoeconomic modelling suggests a minimum of 50–100kL tank capacity — and roughly 500kL total fermentation capacity — just to reach entry-level commercial scale. Some target ingredient markets run into hundreds of thousands or millions of metric tonnes, meaning plant cell production would need to grow dramatically to compete on volume and price with commodity ingredients.
The research is also early-stage. While Brevel reports "very nice successes" with cocoa and coffee cell cultures, the grant is explicitly designed to determine whether light even works as a meaningful lever for Ayana Bio's specific cell lines.
The signal: This grant illustrates how government-backed programmes such as the BIRD Foundation are bridging the gap between early-stage biomanufacturing companies that might otherwise struggle to fund speculative R&D. Brevel, classified as a "breakout" stage company on Dealroom, is pivoting from product maker to platform provider — a model that could accelerate commercialisation across the plant cell culture space if its illuminated fermentation technology proves transferable to multiple cell lines.
Read more: AgFunderNews
