powered quality and compliance platform Backbone is expanding its product and commercial activities after securing pre-seed funding, targeting more automated quality management across the food industry.
Tamara Djurickovic03 September 2026
Food industry software startup Backbone has
raised €4 million in pre-seed funding to further develop its AI-powered quality
and compliance platform and support its commercial expansion. The round was led
by Pitchdrive, with participation from PROfounders Capital, Passion Capital,
existing investor 100IN and a group of Belgian food industry investors,
including Agristo and Darta.
Founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo
and Julien Steel, Backbone develops software designed to help food companies
manage quality and compliance processes. The company is targeting an industry
where many quality operations still rely on spreadsheets, documents and email,
despite increasing regulatory requirements, customer expectations and changing
certification standards.
Quality information within food companies is
often distributed across different departments and systems. Supplier
information may sit with purchasing teams, recipes with R&D, test results
with laboratories, and regulatory and customer requirements with quality teams.
Changes such as introducing a new supplier or recipe can therefore require
multiple teams to manually review and update related information.
Backbone brings this data together in a single
platform, covering areas such as supplier documentation, laboratory results and
regulatory requirements. The software structures the information and checks it
against food safety and quality standards including IFS, BRCGS and FSSC 22000,
allowing teams to identify gaps, search their quality data and prioritise
actions.
Building on this data layer, Backbone is
developing AI agents designed to automate parts of the quality management
process. These include tracking supplier certificates, checking laboratory
results and incoming documents against current specifications, and recording
incidents. The information is brought together in a central dashboard intended
to give quality teams and management an overview of outstanding issues and
priorities.
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. We build an intelligence layer that connects those dots,
understands the context and puts it to work,
said Louis Opsomer, co-founder of Backbone.
Backbone has expanded beyond Belgium into the
UK and the Netherlands. Its customers span the food supply chain, from raw
material and ingredient suppliers to producers, packaging companies and
distributors.
The new capital will be used to further develop
Backbone’s product, expand its marketing activities and pursue partnerships
with international certification bodies and ERP implementation partners.
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