The climate-tech company Brevel has announced it has entered into the plant cell-culture market to help companies scale up production and enhance nutrient yield, utilising its proprietary illuminated fermentation platform.
The firm will partner with cell-culture company Coffeesai to scale its coffee cell production from lab to commercial scale.
Brevel's proprietary biomanufacturing technology uses plant cell culture (PCC), directly growing single plant cells in suspension.
The firm pioneered "illuminated fermentation," a next-generation technology that combines fermentation and PCC with light, unlocking capabilities that traditional dark fermentation cannot attain.
The company said this method of cellular production delivers consistent, continuous production of valuable natural compounds and optimises yield and costs.
Coffeesai will partner with Brevel to use this next-gen technology to accelerate the production of its coffee cell cultures to commercial volumes.
Traditional coffee (especially high-quality Arabica) is highly sensitive to temperature shifts.
Climate change is rapidly shrinking the amount of viable land suitable for coffee farming, with some estimates suggesting that up to 50% of current coffee-growing land could be unusable by 2050.
"Our work in coffee cell cultures serve as a case study for the capabilities of our illuminated fermentation infrastructure," said Yonatan Golan, CEO and co-founder of Brevel.
Our recent work has demonstrated the platform's ability to achieve high cell densities while sustaining continuous growth through an advanced semi-continuous cultivation process, paving the way for scalable and efficient production.
"We are encouraged by the initial results from Brevel's platform and its potential to influence certain aspects of the sensory profile,” added Ami Herman, CEO of Coffeesai.
We continue to evaluate its capabilities as we advance our development efforts and determine future production pathways.
At the core of illuminated fermentation technology is the use of controlled light exposure inside the fermenter to influence cellular output.
Brevel claimed that manipulating the specific light profile can "enhance the flavour and aroma characteristics" of the resulting biomass by modulating the expression of desirable value-added compounds, including phenols and other bioactive compounds.
The company added that success in trials of the technology had been defined by achieving "stable, high-density cultivations output alongside measurable, light-dependent improvements in the quality attributes of the biomass."
"The Israel Innovation Authority granted Brevel $1m specifically to expand our illuminated fermentation platform into plant cell culture and adjacent industries," said Golan.
This collaboration is part of a broader strategy to make our platform accessible to innovators working with light-driven biology.
"Alongside Coffeesai, we have also partnered with Ayana Bio, a US-based plant cell technology company, as well as with a cocoa cell-culture startup."
Brevel's illuminated fermentation technology is the first to combine controlled fermentation with light in a closed system on a commercial scale.
It presents a compelling opportunity for companies whose products will be affected by climate change.
