Food industry software startup Backbone has raised €4 million in pre-Seed funding. The company will use the money to improve its AI-powered platform for food quality and compliance and to grow its business. The funding round was led by Pitchdrive, with participation from PROfounders Capital, Passion Capital, existing investor 100IN, and Belgian food industry investors, including Agristo and Darta.
Backbone was founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo, and Julien Steel. The company develops software that helps food businesses manage quality and compliance tasks. It is targeting an industry where many quality processes still depend on spreadsheets, documents, and emails, even as regulations and customer requirements continue to increase.
Food companies often keep important quality information across different teams and systems. For example, purchasing teams manage supplier information, R&D teams handle recipes, laboratories keep test results, and quality teams manage regulations and customer requirements. Because of this, even a simple change, such as adding a new supplier or recipe, can require several teams to manually check and update information.
Backbone brings this information together on one platform. It covers supplier documents, laboratory results, regulations, and other quality data. The platform checks this information against food safety and quality standards such as IFS, BRCGS, and FSSC 22000. This helps teams find missing information, search their quality data, and focus on the most important tasks.
The company is also developing AI agents that can automate parts of the quality management process. These AI tools can track supplier certificates, check laboratory results and incoming documents against current requirements, and record quality incidents.
All this information is shown on a central dashboard, giving quality teams and managers a clear view of open issues and important tasks that need attention.
“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 grown beyond Belgium and now operates in the UK and the Netherlands.
Its customers come from different parts of the food supply chain, including raw material and ingredient suppliers, food producers, packaging companies, and distributors.
The new funding will help Backbone improve its product, increase its marketing efforts, and build partnerships with international certification bodies and ERP implementation companies.
