- Founded by bioprocess industry veterans, the company introduces the full bioprocess stack engineered to carry biology from benchtop through pilot and industrial production.
- Introduces three bioreactor systems: GECKO™, the benchtop bioreactor platform, SPIRIT™, the pilot bioreactor platform, and JUMBO™, the production bioreactor platform
- Launches STRYPES™, the AI-assisted process control software that is integrated across all three bioreactor systems
EMERYVILLE, Calif. & ROVERETO, Italy, September 30, 2026 / Biotech Newswire / -- Thewaico, a bioprocess innovation company, today emerged from stealth with an integrated bioreactor and bioprocess control platform developed to address one of biomanufacturing's most persistent and costly failures: processes that perform reliably at laboratory scale but break down at production volumes, largely because the underlying software and hardware were never designed for a continuous path to scale.
The economic cost is substantial. According to analyses by Boston Consulting Group and Synonym (now Roebling), synthetic biology has absorbed an estimated $8 to $12 billion in destroyed capital over the past 15 years, a significant portion of it attributed to the transition from validated laboratory results to viable manufacturing processes.¹ At the same time, the growth of emerging biomanufacturing applications is creating a significant need for additional production capacity. A separate analysis from Innovation Endeavors places current global operating bioreactor capacity at approximately 61 million liters, with only 10 million liters unreserved, against projected demand of up to 10 billion liters for emerging food-sector production by 2030.² Legacy pharmaceutical-grade systems, engineered and priced for high-value therapeutics, are not economically suited to cultivated meat, precision fermentation, biofertilizers, or bio-based materials at commercial scale.
"For years, the industry has concentrated its innovation on the biology while leaving the equipment largely unchanged," said Matteo Brognoli, co-founder and CEO of Thewaico. "Across 25 years in this sector, we have repeatedly seen strong science stall on the scale-up curve because the system a team develops bears little architectural relationship to the system they must produce in. Thewaico was built to close that gap. Scale-up should be a predictable engineering decision, not a source of risk."
To meet this gap, Thewaico is launching with three bioreactor platforms and a unifying AI-assisted software layer, designed to scale by architecture rather than by adaptation and to carry a process from benchtop through pilot and industrial production.
- GECKO™, the company's benchtop bioreactor platform, spans 2 to 10 liters and offers two aspect ratios, flexible component configuration, and a compact footprint optimized for parallel experimentation, with up to 32 units managed from a single software environment.
- SPIRIT™, the company's CIP/SIP pilot platform, covers eight nominal volumes from 30 to 300 liters in a modular design built for flexible process development, scale-up and technology transfer.
- JUMBO™, the company's production-scale bioreactor platform, extends Thewaico's architecture into industrial biomanufacturing, delivering the same modular design principles and process intelligence at commercial volumes.
- STRYPES™, Thewaico's AI-assisted process control software, runs across all three platforms and combines configurable workflow management, novel features designed to assist process scaling, and 21 CFR Part 11 aligned audit trails with industrial PLC reliability.
Alongside its hardware and software launch, Thewaico is introducing a transparent digital commercial model. Customers configure systems directly online, selecting vessel geometry, impeller design, sparger strategy, and control architecture, and receive a technical datasheet and pricing without an extended sales cycle.
"Capital equipment procurement in this industry has long been characterized by opaque pricing and protracted quotation timelines," said Robert Dubuc, president of Thewaico USA. "Process development teams are working against compressed timelines and need clarity on specification and cost at the point of evaluation. We built a transparent digital configurator to move as fast as companies need."
Thewaico is currently onboarding early-access customers across biopharmaceutical, alternative protein, and industrial biotechnology markets. The company will host live demonstrations of the GECKO™ and SPIRIT™ platforms and is accepting customer configuration inquiries directly through www.thewaico.com.
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AI Semantic Keywords: Manufacturing and Industrial Facilities; Bioreactors; Bioprocessing; GECKO™; SPIRIT™; JUMBO™; STRYPES™; Thewaico; biomanufacturing; bioprocess control; bioreactor platform; benchtop bioreactor platform; pilot bioreactor platform; production bioreactor platform; AI-assisted process control software; bioprocess stack; bioprocess scale-up; industrial biomanufacturing; process development; technology transfer; scale-up; modular design; process intelligence; configurable workflow management; process scaling; audit trails; industrial production; commercial volumes; benchtop; pilot; production-scale bioreactor
About Thewaico
Thewaico is a bioprocess innovation company developing modular bioreactor hardware and AI-assisted software to make biomanufacturing scale-up faster, more efficiently, and more economically viable. Founded by a team with more than 25 years of bioprocess engineering experience, including the development, global deployment, and successful exit of a prior company in the sector, Thewaico delivers integrated platforms spanning R&D, pilot, and production scale. The company is headquartered in Rovereto, Italy with US operations headquartered in Emeryville, California.
Contact
Thewaico
Tanya Lytvynenko
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References:
- Stumpf, M. "Digital Twins for Synthetic Biology: A Scientific Postmortem," November 2025, referencing capital destruction analyses by Boston Consulting Group and Synonym (now Roebling). Available at: linkedin.com/posts/michaelstumpf1
- Innovation Endeavors, "Bio Endeavors: It turns out we need to make (a huge amount of) stuff." Available at: innovationendeavours.com/insights/it-turns-out-we-need-to-make-a-huge-amount-of-stuff
- Nussbaum, A. "How a bioreactor shortage is stunting the growth of Europe's techbio startups," Sifted, 2025. Available at: sifted.eu/articles/europe-techbio-startups-problem-bioreactors
- Synonym Bio, "State of Global Fermentation Capacity" report. Available at: synonym.bio
Source: Biotech Newswire