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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