Brevel Turns On the Lights in Fermentation

What does Brevel do?

Brevel develops illuminated fermentation technology that brings controlled light inside industrial bioreactors. This enables companies to grow and scale light-responsive cells, including microalgae and plant cells, in a fully controlled environment, from early development all the way to commercial production.

The current landscape

Fermentation is becoming an increasingly important manufacturing platform for food, nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical ingredients. At the same time, plant cell culture and other cell-based technologies are creating new ways to produce valuable natural compounds independently of traditional agriculture.

The challenge is scale. Conventional fermentation operates in the dark, while many cells and biological processes respond to light. Brevel is the first company to take illuminated fermentation from the lab to commercial scale, reaching 5,000-liter production. This gives light-responsive biology a practical path from early development to industrial manufacturing.

How Brevel started

Brevel was founded in 2017 by three brothers: Ido Golan, a mechanical engineer, had developed a way to improve microalgae production by combining fermentation with light. He brought in his brothers Yonatan, a physicist, and Matan, a medical doctor, and together they turned the idea into Brevel.

What began as a solution for producing microalgae more efficiently evolved into a much broader technology: illuminated fermentation. By bringing controlled light inside industrial bioreactors, Brevel created a way to scale light-responsive cells under fully controlled conditions.

Today, the company is expanding beyond its own microalgae products and opening the platform to other types of biology, including plant cell cultures. The goal is to become the scale-up and manufacturing platform for companies developing valuable cell lines that need light to reach their full potential.

The Brevel solution

Brevel brings light inside the bioreactor. Its illuminated fermentation platform combines fermentation with precisely controlled light, allowing cells that depend on light to be grown in the same kind of controlled environment used in industrial fermentation.

The system is designed to scale gradually — and operates across 3.5 L, 50 L, 500 L and 5,000 L vessels to 5,000-liter commercial production allowing partners to move from process development through pilot validation and into commercial production without changing the underlying platform.

The technology is already commercially operational. Brevel manufactures Purallis™, its chlorella ingredient, using illuminated fermentation, and is now applying it to plant cells, including coffee and cacao.

In plant cell culture, Brevel has demonstrated stable, high-density coffee-cell cultivation with Coffeesai and measurable light-dependent changes in product characteristics. It is also collaborating with Ayana Bio on plant-cell-derived bioactives and has worked with cacao cell cultures.

Brevel’s vision is to become the industrial scale-up and manufacturing infrastructure for light-responsive biology — enabling companies that have developed valuable cell lines to take them from the lab to commercial production.

We built Brevel around a simple question: if biology needs light, why should industrial fermentation happen in the dark? That curiosity still drives us today - to solve hard problems, scale what works, and do it together.

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— Yonatan Golan, CEO

A Brevel customer story

Brevel collaborated with Coffeesai, a coffee cell-culture company, to explore the use of illuminated fermentation and assess its potential to support future scale-up.

The joint trials demonstrated stable, high-density cultivation and sustained growth using a semi-continuous process. They also showed that changing the light profile could influence characteristics linked to the flavor and aroma of the resulting biomass.

The project served as an important case study for Brevel’s platform, demonstrating both its ability to support efficient plant-cell cultivation and the potential of light as an additional tool for shaping product characteristics as the process moves toward commercial scale.

The team culture at Brevel

Brevel combines the mindset of a biotech start-up with the discipline of a manufacturing company. Scientists, engineers, production, QA and commercial teams work closely together, and an experiment is not considered successful simply because it works in the lab - the question is whether it can remain stable, reproducible and practical at scale.

The culture is also very close-knit. The whole team eats lunch together every day, with a vegetarian meal that reflects the company’s preference for plant-based food. During school holidays, Brevel runs a free on-site camp for employees’ children, making it easier for parents to manage work and family life.

Transparency is another important part of the culture: every week, the entire company meets and management shares updates across the business, so everyone understands what is happening beyond their own role.