The power of accidental discovery

The story of Velcro remains one of the most compelling examples of bio-inspired innovation. In 1941, a Swiss engineer noticed burr seeds clinging to his dog's fur, sparking the creation of a revolutionary fastening system now found everywhere.

Today, we’re seeing equally fascinating breakthroughs, this time from the frontiers of science and technology.

Researchers are storing data in DNA molecules through Biomemory, unlocking the potential for ultra-dense, durable information storage. Meanwhile, companies like Sparxell are harnessing structural coloration, the way nature produces color without pigments, to create sustainable, vivid materials for everything from packaging to fashion.

Yet here’s the challenge: most bio-inspired innovations still arise from chance rather than systematic exploration. We’re surrounded by solutions honed by billions of years of evolution, but for most R&D teams, these insights remain hidden and serendipitous.

Bridging the biomimicry gap

The vision behind Asteria emerged from recognizing a clear market opportunity. R&D and innovation teams across industries face similar challenges: lengthy development cycles, sustainability pressures, and the need for breakthrough solutions that deliver both effectiveness and environmental benefits.

While interest in biomimicry is growing among R&D professionals, implementation remains challenging. Many teams lack the tools, methodologies, and cross-disciplinary collaboration frameworks needed to systematically explore biological mechanisms.

Asteria was created to bridge this gap. Our platform empowers innovation teams to translate biological insights into practical, implementable solutions that meet real-world industrial and environmental constraints.

By integrating rigorous scientific knowledge with technology-driven workflows, Asteria helps companies accelerate innovation while embedding sustainability at the core of their processes.

Origins

The Asteria project was initially developed within Ceebios by our co-founders Eliot Graeff and Nikolay Tchakarov. To give the company full autonomy and accelerate its industrial vision, it was later spun out through a strategic collaboration with Anima.

Today, Asteria operates independently, while maintaining strong ties with both Ceebios and Anima, benefiting from their insights while remaining fully independent in its strategy and execution.

How Asteria works in practice

Here’s how Asteria’s specialized biomimetic AI agents accelerate innovation flow in three key steps.

Step 1: Frame your challenges

Structure your innovation projects with guided, biomimicry-based methodological frameworks. Break down complex business and technical challenges into functional needs through an intuitive abstraction and framing process.

The systematic approach includes:

• Describe your system: Clearly outline the system or process you are working on.
• Analyze your objectives: Examine your goals to identify the root causes behind your challenges.
• Define project constraints: Specify the boundaries and limitations of your project to ensure realistic, implementable solutions.

This framework helps teams move beyond surface-level solutions to understand the core functions they need to address, making biological insights directly applicable to their specific contexts.

Step 2: Explore biological-inspired strategies

Access biological mechanisms through the world's largest curated database of bio-inspired strategies, built from over 680,000 design-ready mechanisms. Asteria's semantic AI scours scientific literature to make complex biological knowledge both accessible and actionable for your teams.

What makes this unique:

• Verified sources: Every biological-inspired strategy links directly to its scientific source, ensuring complete traceability and credibility.
• Curated content: Dive into simplified, bio-inspired concepts that are immediately ready for innovative applications.
• AI analysis: Upload your own scientific articles and transform them into clear, functional insights using Asteria's AI-powered abstraction tool.

Whether you're exploring gecko adhesion for new materials or butterfly wing optics for display technologies, the platform connects you with both validated biological mechanisms and biomimetic technologies that have been developed to leverage the results of these billions of years of evolution.

Step 3: Generate bio-inspired solutions

Transform inspiration into action. Asteria helps you convert insights into structured, shareable briefs for your R&D, engineering, design, and innovation teams.

The solution generation process:

• Rapid concept generation: Quickly generate many bio-inspired concepts specifically tailored to your project or challenge.
• Implementation pathways: Identify relevant technologies, whether existing lab techniques, patented solutions, or off-the-shelf options, to bring concepts closer to realization.
• Help you with modeling and simulating your ideas : our agents give you all the parameters and protocols to turn your ideas into engineering products.
• Environmental impact guidance: Highlight key criteria for assessing environmental impact to help prioritize concepts and make informed decisions.

Teams can seamlessly move from biological discovery through functional analysis to practical, implementable solutions that address real-world constraints while maintaining the elegance and efficiency of nature's designs.

Who uses Asteria?

The platform is designed for diverse innovation roles, supporting teams across R&D, design, engineering, and project management.

• R&D engineers aim to innovate faster while meeting their feasibility constraints (standards, costs, technical specifications…). Exploring nature through a structured project flow helps them balance creativity with technical requirements.
  They use Asteria to explore bio-inspired strategies based on the constraints they define directly within the platform. Asteria helps identify relevant insights across mechanical, chemical, functional, or systemic topics.

• Innovation project managers face significant communication and collaboration challenges with the various stakeholders involved in a project.
  Asteria’s collaborative features allow them to bring diverse expertises together around the same topic, but also to extract and export clear outputs that highlight the innovation opportunities inspired by nature.
  The platform helps them evaluate concepts using criteria such as innovation potential, maturity, and performance, and to clearly articulate the biomimetic inspiration behind their proposals.
  The goal is to give them the best tools to fully play their role as managers, pitch to innovation committees, and maximize the impact of their projects.

• Researchers and scientists use Asteria as a scientific watch tool to study biological mechanisms and explore their potential applications within their field.
  They can rely on more than 680,000 biological models and 200,000 bio-inspired patents to conduct robust, well-documented watch activities based on clearly explained models, making it easier to identify principles inspired from living systems that can be transferred to their research or innovation challenges.

Asteria empowers these roles to collaborate efficiently, bridging scientific insights with practical application across complex innovation projects.

Measuring real impact

The first organizations to adopt Asteria are already seeing a shift. Not just in how they innovate, but in how their teams collaborate and make decisions.

Innovation cycles are shortening.

Projects that once took months to move from idea to prototype now do so in a matter of weeks.

By tapping into evolution’s vast library of solutions, teams identify relevant biological-inspired strategies faster and translate them into actionable concepts with unprecedented efficiency.

Collaboration is improving.

R&D engineers, designers, and innovation managers now share a common language, one grounded in functions, systems, and nature’s design principles.

This shared framework strengthens teamwork, creativity, and overall satisfaction across departments that used to operate in silos.

What sets Asteria apart?

While many AI tools promise to accelerate innovation, few truly understand how nature innovates.

Asteria stands apart because it combines the power of artificial intelligence with the depth of scientific knowledge and the discipline of biomimicry, turning 3.8 billion years of natural R&D into an accessible, actionable innovation system.

Scientific integrity at its core

Every biological-inspired strategy in Asteria originates from peer-reviewed scientific literature. Unlike generalist AI tools trained on unverified data, Asteria’s knowledge base is 100% science-backed and structured through a proprietary knowledge graph, ensuring accuracy, traceability, and practical relevance for real-world applications.

A specialized intelligence. Not a general one

Asteria’s AI agents are trained on biomimetic principles and designed to assist teams in functional abstraction, biological analogy, sustainable concept generation and concrete development of biomimetic technologies.

Rather than producing approximate ideas, they identify precise biological mechanisms and associated technologies to translate them into implementable innovation pathways.

From inspiration to implementation

Most AI systems stop at ideation; Asteria goes further. The platform guides users through structured development frameworks, helping them move from biological insight to market-ready, sustainable solutions.

Collaboration built in by design

Asteria brings R&D, design, sustainability, and innovation teams together on a single platform. Its collaborative workspace allows users to visualize relationships between ideas, manage shared knowledge, and track progress, making innovation both faster and more transparent.

Tangible, measurable outcomes

Organizations using Asteria consistently report:

• Time savings: several weeks to months gained on exploratory phases.
• Cost efficiency: an annual license costs less than 10 days of external consulting.
• Differentiation: 680,000+ functional strategies unlocking thousands of novel concepts.
• Sustainability by design: integrating the principles of biomimicry and the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) at every stage.

In short, Asteria is not just another AI. It’s specialized intelligence built for innovators, where scientific rigor, collaboration, and sustainability come together to transform the way we design the future.

The future of bio-inspired innovation

Asteria represents a shift toward systematic nature-inspired innovation. The platform is working toward a future where:

• R&D teams routinely draw on evolution’s proven solutions, rather than relying solely on serendipitous discoveries.
• Cross-functional collaboration has become the standard approach for complex innovation challenges.
• Bio-inspired products gain market dominance through superior efficiency and sustainability profiles.
• Innovation processes contribute positively to ecosystem health rather than depleting natural resources.

Getting started

Teams ready to explore systematic bio-inspired innovation can begin quickly with Asteria.

The platform helps organizations identify key challenges, discover relevant nature-inspired strategies, and translate insights into actionable concepts.

By learning from systems that have evolved over billions of years, teams can unlock new opportunities for sustainable and innovative solutions.

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