Backbone Raises €4M to Bring AI-Powered Food Safety Compliance to Producers

Brussels-based food technology startup Backbone has raised €4 million in pre-seed funding to help food producers modernise quality management and move away from fragmented workflows built around Excel, Word and email.

The round was led by Pitchdrive, with participation from PROfounders Capital, Passion Capital, 100IN and Belgian food industry families including Agristo and Darta.

Backbone plans to use the funding for product development and marketing as it works to bring AI-powered quality intelligence to food production facilities.

Connecting fragmented food safety data

Founded in October 2025, Backbone is building an intelligence layer that brings together the different sources of information food producers rely on to manage quality and compliance.

Supplier certificates, laboratory results, recipes, purchasing information, internal records, regulations and customer requirements are often managed across disconnected systems and documents.

Backbone's platform is designed to consolidate this information and connect the context between different departments.

According to the company, around 80% of food producers still rely heavily on tools such as Excel, Word and email for quality management. This fragmentation can make it harder for quality teams to identify potential problems early.

Lessons from a global food safety crisis

Backbone's funding comes after a major infant formula contamination crisis that resulted in recalls across more than 60 countries.

The incident highlighted the risks associated with fragmented supply-chain and quality information, as contamination moved through different manufacturers before being detected.

Backbone aims to use AI to help food companies identify potential quality risks earlier by connecting information from suppliers, laboratories, auditors and internal teams.

Rather than simply generating compliance documentation, the platform is designed to help quality teams understand relationships between data points and make faster decisions.

A second startup for the Henchman team

Backbone was founded by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel, who previously held management roles at legal technology company Henchman.

Henchman was acquired by LexisNexis in 2024. Opsomer and Lannoo had also previously worked together at Showpad.

The founders saw parallels between the fragmented document workflows they encountered in legal technology and the disconnected quality data used across food manufacturing.

The company's early backers included Henchman founders Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker, who also invested in 100IN, a €12 million pre-seed fund that participated in Backbone's latest round.

Competing through connected intelligence

Backbone enters a food safety technology market that includes established compliance and factory-floor solutions.

Estonian company FoodDocs focuses on food safety documentation and HACCP planning, while Ghent-based Polysense uses computer vision to detect manufacturing defects on the factory floor.

Backbone is taking a different approach by focusing on the connections between quality information generated across the production and supply chain.

The company is also working with certification bodies and Microsoft on Copilot integration as it develops its platform.

Targeting 250 production sites

Backbone says it wants its technology to be operating across 250 production sites by the end of 2028.

The company's challenge will be convincing food producers and regulators that AI can reliably identify potential quality and contamination risks while keeping human oversight in place.

With the latest €4 million investment, Backbone is betting that connecting existing food safety data can help companies move from documenting quality problems to identifying and addressing them before they become costly recalls.