Belgian food quality AI startup Backbone raises €4 million pre-Seed round

Backbone, a Brussels-based AI OS for quality and compliance in the food industry, has raised €4 million in a pre-Seed round. to expand its marketing activities and invest further in product development.

The round was led by Pitchdrive, with participation from PROfounders Capital and Passion Capital, alongside existing investor 100IN and a consortium of Belgian food families, including Agristo and Darta.

“A food company today has all the data it needs to make better quality decisions, but the different data points aren’t talking to each other,” says Louis Opsomer, co-founder of Backbone. “R&D knows the recipe, purchasing knows the supplier, the lab has the test results and quality knows the regulations and customer requirements. We build an intelligence layer that connects those dots, understands the context and puts it to work.”

Backbone’s pre-Seed round can be contextualised when comparing it to similar 2026 investments in technologies applying AI, automation and data infrastructure to food-industry operations.

EU-Startups has reported approximately €69.1 million across five relevant or adjacent rounds this year, including €2 million for Barcelona-based Mafer AI‘s AI OS for formulation and regulatory workflows, €2.6 million for German food-safety analytics startup NanoStruct, €1 million for Spanish sensory-intelligence platform Sensesbit, €8 million for AI-powered food production forecasting company Foodforecast and €55.5 million for Orbem‘s automated food-inspection technology.

Brussels-based food BioTech company MAASH raised €12.15 million in an adjacent segment – providing a same-country comparison.

“The food industry has spent years investing in ERP systems and inline quality control vision systems to register everything. The next step is putting all that information to work. With Backbone, quality teams don’t just register what happened, they can connect the context, spot risks earlier and make the right decision at the right moment. By the end of 2028, we want Backbone to be running across 250 production sites,” adds Siska Lannoo, co-founder of Backbone.

Backbone was founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel, three former Henchman managers. Backbone automates the daily quality operations of food producers, from supplier tracking and document control to incident management and compliance analysis.

Backbone has expanded its customer base beyond Belgium into the UK and the Netherlands, with customers including Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro, Euromeat, Budelpack, Royal Taste and J&K Confectionery.

The company now serves businesses across the entire food supply chain, from raw material and ingredient suppliers to producers, packaging companies and distributors. Backbone recently also partnered with AMNorman, a leading food safety and quality consultancy.

According to the company, quality is one of the last mission-critical functions still running on manual work for food companies. 80% of producers today still rely on Excel, Word or e-mail for their daily quality operations. At the same time, pressure is mounting from stricter regulation, growing customer requirements and ever-evolving certification standards.

As per their comments, poor quality costs producers up to 15% of revenue. The problem is rarely one major failure, but an accumulation of small deviations caught too late.

When a producer switches suppliers or introduces a new recipe, for example, it triggers a cascade of manual checks. Teams across purchasing, R&D and sales end up looking up and entering the same information separately.

The relevant data exists, but sits across different systems, documents and teams, with little connection between them and leading to delays and misunderstandings. By the time a mismatch surfaces, the product may already be in production, or worse, on the shelf.

Backbone brings all quality-related data together in one platform, from supplier documents and lab results to regulatory requirements. That data is automatically structured and checked against standards such as IFS, BRCGS and FSSC 22000. This creates a shared quality brain for the organisation: teams can see where gaps exist, ask questions across their own quality data and understand which actions deserve priority.

Instead of quality information sitting passively in files and systems, it becomes usable across the business; from quality and R&D to purchasing, operations and sales.

On top of that layer, Backbone is building AI agents that can take over entire quality processes. They track supplier certificates, check incoming lab results and documents against current specifications, and log incidents automatically. All information comes together in a central quality cockpit, giving management one place to prioritise work and make decisions.