From kitchens to space labs, Nate Petre went from cooking food to “baking” bioreactors as CEO of Chainreactor. With a PhD in machines, reef-building in Jamaica, and even a NASA project on seaweed surfboards, he’s now reinventing how biology is made. Chainreactor’s mission: replace pharma-style mega bioreactors with modular, affordable systems that scale like cloud servers. Their 3D-printed, sensor-rich vessels let startups grow meat, wood, or materials without million-dollar upfront costs. The goal? Democratize biomanufacturing, slash emissions, and turn biology into infrastructure anyone can access. To learn more, I sat down with Nate, offered some flavored toothpicks, and started to geek out.

I went from cooking in kitchens to literally baking bioreactors (part of our secret recipe). Along the way, NASA paid me to make surfboards out of seaweed, Imperial College handed me a PhD in designing weird machines, and somewhere in Jamaica I found myself building artificial reefs. Now I’m back in the kitchen—just this time the “kitchen” grows meat, wood, and who-knows-what else.

Biomanufacturing, like breweries for biology, is stuck in the Ferrari phase—beautiful, expensive, and only a few can drive it. But the world needs Volkswagens: affordable, robust, and everywhere. Right now, bioreactors are the bottleneck. If you can’t grow cells cheaply, you can’t feed or furnish the planet sustainably.

We build a biomanufacturing platform rather than just affordable bioreactors. Chainreactor is like the 'allen key model' or at least that's our plan, like IKEA - build modular, easy to ship, and friendly to anyone who can turn an allen key. Our customers are food-tech, biomaterials, and synbio companies who can't afford to shell out half a million just to test an idea. Our idea was to be able to print, click, and ship— in weeks, not years

Most of the industry is obsessed with what we call “scale-up.” You start small, build a giant steel tank, and hope physics plays nice. Spoiler: it rarely does. We’ve taken the opposite view. We believe the future is scale-out — building many mid-sized, modular vessels that can run in parallel, each one smart, sensor-rich, and connected. Imagine a bioreactor not as a cathedral of stainless steel but as a server in a data center. When you need more capacity, you don’t double the cathedral; you just add another server. That’s exactly how we build.

Our vessels are 3D-printed up to 2,000 liters, proprietary sterilizable polymers, and packed with sensors that monitor pH, oxygen, temperature, mixing — all the things that make biology tick. Each vessel has a digital twin running alongside it, simulating behavior, predicting what the cells are about to do, and learning over time. The uniqueness is not just in the materials or the design — though we’ve pushed both — but in the philosophy: biology should scale like the cloud. You don’t wait five years for a mega-reactor; you add capacity like you’d add storage on AWS.

If our math is right, biomanufacturing stops being an expensive science-focused item and becomes infrastructure. Suddenly a food-tech startup in Lisbon or Nairobi or São Paulo can prototype cultured fat without spending millions. A materials company can grow mahogany dashboards for Bentleys without cutting down a single tree. A sneaker brand can ferment new fibers instead of sewing polyester. The real impact is that biology becomes democratic — not reserved for pharma giants or billion-dollar players, but available for anyone with the imagination to try.

And on a planetary scale, companies using our kit can cut 1/4 of CO2 emissions with plant cells alone. Less deforestation, less methane, less fossil-fuel chemistry. You could imagine entire industries shifting their supply chains from extraction to cultivation. It’s biology as a quiet revolution — and if we do our job, the engines of that revolution will be our reactors.

We don’t just sell tanks, a 'dumb' control and walk away. Nobody really wants to own a bioreactor — they want what comes out of it. So we run a Hardware-as-a-Service model. You subscribe to capacity, not just equipment. On top of that, we provide software — digital twins that help optimize processes — and eventually, data. Because once you’re running dozens of vessels across different companies, the data itself becomes valuable, a kind of collective intelligence for how biology behaves.

The response so far has been refreshing: people tell us, “Finally, something we can afford to try.” That’s the litmus test. If your first prototype costs a million euros, you’re dead in the water before you begin. If it costs a fraction of that, suddenly new ideas are possible. That’s the economic unlock we’re aiming for.

The bioeconomy is estimated in the trillions, and it’s still in its early chapters. The drivers are obvious: climate pressure, consumer demand for sustainability, and regulation nudging industries away from fossil fuels and animal agriculture. If you zoom in, you see verticals — cultivated food, biomaterials, biochemicals — all trying to scale but bottlenecked by the same thing: bioreactors that were designed for drugs, not burgers.

Our competition is basically stainless-steel pharma reactors — brilliant for antibodies, disastrous for cell-based fat or plant-cell wood. They’re expensive, slow to scale, and brutally unforgiving to anyone outside pharma. We’re not trying to out-Ferrari the Ferraris. We’re building Volkswagens. Affordable, robust, everywhere. The point of difference is that we’re betting on scale-out, not scale-up. We want to be the company that makes biology feel more like setting up a cloud server farm than a cathedral build.

We’re building toward the idea of the “biological data center.” Over the next two to three years, that means deploying fleets of modular vessels with early partners — universities, startups, corporates — and proving that scaling-out works better than scaling-up. It means refining automation so these vessels run more like robots than tanks. And it means growing the team around data science, process engineering, and design.

The conversation in this industry needs to shift and we're going to be the lever. Instead of asking, “How big is your tank?” people will ask, “How many racks are you running?” That’s when we’ll know the model has stuck — when bioreactors are no longer bespoke objects but actual infrastructure.

Our first check came from Heartfelt Capital. Robert Martin has been our strongest cheerleader from day one and we’re proud to have him in our corner. We were also picked for the Norrsken Evolve cohort, and Norrsken came in on the same SAFE. Since then we’ve been generating revenue from real customers using our bioreactors, which is the part of the story I find most fun to tell. Right now we’re raising a €3.5M seed at an €8M pre, with several active conversations on the deck. In parallel we’re leading a roughly €14.5M EU grant consortium called PRISMA, with partners across Portugal and Denmark, and we’re closing a lease this week on a Northern Portugal site that takes us out of the hair salon we’re currently in (which, to be fair, is huge and fits large format printers) and into the factory phase. The team has grown around that thesis: a CTO building the control stack, a commercial lead opening up the food, materials and bio-pharma pipelines, and a prospective CSO with a serious bioprocess pedigree. The position we’re in feels unusual: a multimillion-euro business already, and we still haven’t closed a priced round.

We’re looking for three kinds of people. First, angel investors who understand infrastructure plays — the ones who saw what happened when cloud computing replaced server rooms. Second, partners who want to run biology differently — food, fashion, materials, energy. And third, the misfit engineers and designers who want to bend biology into new shapes. If that’s you, get in touch.

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