Backbone raises €4M for automated food quality and compliance

Food industry software startup Backbone has secured €4 million in pre-seed funding to advance its AI-powered quality and compliance platform and support its commercial growth. Led by Pitchdrive, the round attracted additional investment from PROfounders Capital, Passion Capital, existing investor 100IN, and a roster of Belgian food industry investors, including Agristo and Darta.

Backbone was established in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo, and Julien Steel, with the goal of assisting food companies in managing their quality and compliance procedures.

The sector is plagued by many quality operations still depending on spreadsheets, documents, and email, even as regulatory demands, customer expectations, and evolving certification standards rise. Information on quality within food enterprises is frequently fragmented across various departments and systems. Suppliers may be stored with purchasing teams, recipes with R&D, test results with labs, and regulatory and customer requirements with quality teams.

Consequently, changes like introducing a fresh supplier or recipe may necessitate multiple teams to manually review and update pertinent information.

By consolidating this data into a single platform, Backbone addresses these issues. The platform encompasses supplier documentation, laboratory results, and regulatory requirements. It organizes the data and checks it against food safety and quality standards such as IFS, BRCGS, and FSSC 22000. This enables teams to identify gaps, search their quality data, and prioritize actions.

Leveraging this data layer, Backbone is developing AI agents intended to automate certain aspects of the quality management process. These include monitoring supplier certificates, verifying laboratory results and incoming documents against current specifications, and documenting incidents. The information is consolidated into a central dashboard aimed at providing quality teams and management with a view of outstanding issues and priorities.

Louis Opsomer, co-founder of Backbone, remarked, "A food company today possesses all the data required for superior quality decisions, but the disparate data points do not communicate with one another. We construct an intelligence layer that links those dots, grasps the context, and puts it into practice." With the new capital, Backbone aims to further develop its product, boost its marketing initiatives, and forge partnerships with international certification bodies and ERP implementation partners, extending its reach beyond Belgium into the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.