Biosphere secures US$9 million Army contract to turn air into battlefield protein

Biosphere has secured a contract with a total potential value of up to US$9 million from the US Army to develop a portable biomanufacturing system capable of producing protein-rich food from air, water, and energy in contested and remote environments.

• Biosphere was awarded an Other Transaction Authority agreement worth up to US$9 million to develop a field-deployable protein production system for the US Army over 42 months.
• The platform has been designed to produce 2,800 calories per person per day for up to 18 warfighters, with plans to scale future systems to support 250 personnel.
• The system uses gas fermentation and Biosphere’s UV-sterilized bioreactor technology to create protein-rich biomass for shakes, bars, and ration components.

The agreement was awarded by the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, Manufacturing Science and Technology Program through the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center. The project included a baseline effort and three additional options focused on designing, developing, and demonstrating a field-deployable biomanufacturing platform.

“I can't speak to what specifically motivated military leadership on this program,” Brian Heligman, Biosphere’s co-founder & CEO, told Protein Production Technology International. “What I can say is that contested logistics and biomanufacturing are two of the critical technology areas the DOW has identified, and they go hand in hand.

“Just in the past few weeks Ukrainian soldiers near Kupyansk went without food for days because drone strikes made resupply across the Oskil River nearly impossible. If you can produce critical resources closer to the point of need instead of running resupply convoys through a war zone, you change that equation fundamentally.”

The project aligned with the Department of War’s wider push into bioindustrial manufacturing, an area expected to receive more than US$300 million in planned investment during fiscal year 2026.

The Army contract also arrived little more than a year after Biosphere emerged from stealth with its UV-sterilized bioreactor platform and a US$8.8 million seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital and VXI Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, GS Futures, Caffeinated Capital, and B37 Ventures. At the time, the company disclosed an additional US$1.5 million Department of Defense contract focused on critical bioproduct manufacturing.

Biosphere launched publicly in January 2025 with claims that its reactor architecture could reduce capital costs for biomanufacturing by more than 50% while delivering significantly higher production capacity per dollar invested.

“Our UV bioreactor is not an incremental improvement; it’s a first-principles reimagining of biomanufacturing systems,” Heligman said at the time. “We’re replacing 80-year-old technology with a cost-effective, scalable platform designed for the future.”

At the center of the initiative is a compact gas fermentation platform designed to operate outside traditional industrial infrastructure.

“We are using a gas fermentation process where microbes consume simple gaseous inputs, water, and minerals, and convert them into protein-rich biomass,” said Heligman.

“At a high level, this is the same biological logic as crop growth – carbon, water, nutrients, and energy become biomass – but instead of relying on sunlight and soil, we’re running the process in a controlled bioreactor using electrical energy.

“The output is a nutritionally dense ingredient, similar to a protein concentrate, which can be formulated into shakes, bars, or rations.”

The company said the first-generation system had been designed to produce 2,800 calories per person per day for up to 18 warfighters operating in remote or logistically constrained conditions. Biosphere and Army researchers also planned to use the project to model larger systems capable of supporting up to 250 personnel.

“The 18-person system represents the integrated machine at the smallest feasible scale: biology, reactor, sterility, automation, and downstream processing in a deployable format,” he said.

“The 250-person system represents the next step up, where some of the most aggressive constraints get relaxed. Having both allows the military to extrapolate across the full range of relevant systems and match the system to the actual operational need.”

While gas fermentation itself was already proven at both laboratory and industrial scales, the challenge lay in shrinking the surrounding infrastructure into something rugged enough for deployment in the field.

That challenge sat at the core of Biosphere’s broader thesis about the limitations of modern biomanufacturing infrastructure. The company argued that despite major advances in synthetic biology and strain engineering, commercial deployment had continued to lag because fermentation systems remained expensive, highly specialized, and difficult to operate.

In earlier statements outlining the company’s strategy, Heligman described much of the sector’s infrastructure as effectively locked into reactor designs first developed during the penicillin era in the 1940s.

Traditional steam-sterilized fermentation systems often require extensive stainless-steel piping, steam-in-place sterilization hardware, and complex facility infrastructure, contributing to construction costs that can reach hundreds of millions of dollars for commercial-scale facilities.

Biosphere’s alternative approach relies on UV sterilization and simplified reactor architecture intended to reduce both infrastructure requirements and operational complexity.

“Gas fermentation works at both lab scale and large industrial scale,” he said. “The less-mapped territory is what happens in between: how small and deployable you can make the system before cost and complexity overwhelms the value of distributed production.

“Most fermentation systems assume a controlled facility around them, while a field-deployable system has to internalize that infrastructure.

“The challenges are maintenance, water and media handling, energy use, and downstream processing. This is where Biosphere UV bioreactors come in. Sterile operation is one of the most complex aspects of fermentation. If we can reduce dependence on traditional steam-in-place infrastructure, we can make reactors simpler, more automated, and more realistic to deploy outside conventional facilities.”

Biosphere said the contract would fund several development phases, beginning with process selection and design before progressing through pilot-scale demonstrations and a full-scale prototype capable of continuous operation.

Additional work would focus on water and media recycling, autonomous operation, and downstream processing technologies capable of converting microbial biomass into shelf-stable food products.

“We have a clear path to a neutral protein powder with sensory and functional characteristics comparable to whey protein, slotting into familiar formats like shakes, bars, and ration components,” he said.

“It won’t replace a hot meal, but if it can reduce the need for rationing in contested environments it will serve its purpose.”

Nicole Favreau Farhadi, Technical Lead at the US Army DEVCOM Soldier Center, said the program aligned with efforts to reduce logistical burden while improving operational flexibility. “This effort reflects the military’s focus on advancing resilient, forward-deployed capabilities that reduce logistical burden and enhance operational flexibility,” she said. “Technologies that enable on-site production of critical resources, beginning with nutrition, represent an important step toward more adaptive and distributed sustainment in future operating environments.”

Biosphere co-founder and COO Arye Lipman said nutrition represented only the first use case for the company’s platform. “This program will validate our platform's ability to deliver autonomous, point-of-need biomanufacturing,” Lipman said. “While nutrition is the initial application, the platform can produce fuels, chemicals, and advanced materials, with potential to expand distributed manufacturing in remote and resource-constrained environments.”

“The reactor capabilities we’re working on – sterility, automation, mass transfer, robustness – show up across all biomanufacturing,” Heligman said.

“This program hardens those primitives in a very demanding environment. Once you have reliable, deployable reactor infrastructure, you can start asking where else distributed production makes sense.

“We can’t go into detail on specific future products that will be produced on this platform, but for specific critical inputs that feed into military supply chains, the approach is highly tractable.”

The work will be carried out at Biosphere’s California facilities, with final product samples delivered to the Army’s Combat Feeding Division for evaluation.

In previous company statements, Biosphere outlined ambitions around distributed manufacturing platforms capable of producing food ingredients, chemicals, therapeutics, biodegradable materials, and other bio-based products closer to the point of use.

The company has also discussed a longer-range goal of coupling biomanufacturing infrastructure with renewable energy systems, using biological processes to convert carbon inputs into proteins and industrial materials.

“Fundamentally, biomanufacturing is a resilient, scalable, and efficient way to make a wide array of critical inputs to the global economy, but today's production systems are too expensive, fragile, and difficult to operate,” he said.

“Biosphere is focused on unlocking new categories of bioproduction and strengthening domestic supply chains through innovation on bioreactor systems. Our central mission is to usher in the next generation of biomanufacturing through low cost, performant, and scalable systems.

“This Army program is an important application of our technology: the logistics problem is real, the operating constraints are hard, and there is a clear national security need. Defense is a strong forcing function for our technology.

“But the broader opportunity is changing where and how essential resources get made for both private and public sector applications.”