What does it mean to be a state-of-the-art ecosystem?

After nine years of development, Impello has moved into a new innovation campus and launched a custom-built fermentation facility designed to produce co-cultured microbial systems at scale—with lab-level control and significantly expanded capacity.

Since our founding, Impello has been following a simple but challenging idea: that biological products should be held to the same standard of performance, consistency, and reliability as anything else upon which a grower depends.

That’s easy to say. Much harder to do; especially when the products themselves are alive, dynamic, and inherently complex. But after much planning and design, we’ve completed a state-of the art biomanufacturing facility in service of this goal.

Not just a new facility—but an campus ecosystem of innovation.

This facility can be found in our new home at The Forge Campus, an innovation hub designed to bring together companies working on the future of applied science and technology.

So, what we have in our new facility is not just a new space, but a reflection of something we believe more and more strongly:

The best systems don’t isolate innovation—they build environments where it can interact, evolve, and improve.

In agriculture, we see this every day. Healthy systems—soil systems, plant systems, microbial systems—don’t simplify themselves. They become more capable by learning how to govern complexity.

Designing for complexity, not avoiding it

At the center of this transition is a new fermentation facility built specifically for what we do:
co-culturing multiple microbial species into a single, functional system. Most fermentation systems aren’t built for that. They’re designed for single organisms, because those are less challenging to control.

Our products are not simple in that way. They are designed to reflect microbial ecologies, where multiple organisms interact, support each other, and create layered effects.

This kind of system is powerful—but only if you can control it.

Eighteen months to build the right system

Over the past 18 months, our team has designed a system built from the ground up to meet that challenge. This system was not adapted, not retrofitted. It was designed. The new system includes high degrees of automation, adaptable, software-driven control, and precise management of fermentation conditions. And this is all in service of something that is surprisingly rare: control over a complex biological system

Why does “control at scale” matter?

Control at scale ensures that biological products are consistent, reliable, and perform the same way in the field as they do in development.

It’s one thing to achieve control at the bench scale. That’s where most biological innovation begins. It’s another thing entirely to maintain that same level of control when you scale up. That’s where most systems start to lose precision—and where inconsistency can enter.

What’s different about this facility is that it allows us to maintain that level of control at production scale.

For growers, that translates directly to more consistent products, predictable performance and better alignment between what we design and what you apply

Built to grow with the industry

This move isn’t just about control. It’s also about capacity.

This first stage system supports 250,000 liters per year of fermentation capacity and 1 million gallons of biochemical formulation mixing capacity. And importantly, it was designed with room to expand and add fermenters for increased throughput and so we can scale alongside rapid adoption now taking place across agriculture and horticulture. Because we don’t see co-cultured biology as a niche. We see it as a direction the industry is moving toward.

Why does this matter in the field?

This move improves product consistency, scalability, and reliability and helps ensure that biological products perform as expected under real-world conditions.

For growers, this isn’t about a facility. It’s about trust. Biological products only work when they are produced consistently, behave predictably, and match the intent of their design.

This new system strengthens that connection.

It allows us to produce complex microbial systems reliably, increase consistency across batches, and continue improving based on field feedback. In short, it helps close the gap between what biologicals promise and what they deliver.

What is a state-of-the-art ecosystem?

This phrase gets used a lot: state of the art.

Most often, it refers to equipment (like our super shiny fermenters!) or some other technology that simplifies a formerly complex process or product. While this is all true, we also think about it a little differently.

What if “state of the art” isn’t about simplification—but about better ways to manage complexity?

That’s what ecosystems do.

They don’t eliminate interaction. They organize it.
They don’t remove variability. They stabilize it.
They don’t avoid complexity. They make it functional.

So, this new facility, this new space at The Forge innovation campus, the people and ideas at Impello: They’re all part of the same goal: to build a system where complex biology can be understood, controlled, and delivered in a way that works for growers.

It reflects our belief that biologicals can be better: more consistent, more reliable, more useful -if- we are willing to do the harder work of building systems that match their complexity.

We’re excited about what this new space makes possible.

And we’re just getting started.