Quality is a differentiator for every food producer, yet 80% still run their daily quality operations through spreadsheets, email and manual processes. 

Backbone, the AI operating system for quality and compliance in the food industry is here to change that and has raised €4 million in a pre-seed round led by Pitchdrive, with participation from British funds PROfounders Capital and Passion Capital. Existing investor 100IN also participated in the round. The startup will use the capital to expand its marketing activities and invest further in product development.

For many food companies, quality is one of the last mission-critical functions still running largely on manual work. 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. 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 immediately 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.

"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."

Quality agents

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.

Industry backing

Backbone was founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel. In a short time, Backbone has expanded its customer base beyond Belgium into the UK and the Netherlands, with customers including J&K Confectionery, Budelpack and Royal Taste, among others. 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.

The €4 million pre-seed round is 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.

With the capital, Backbone will invest further in product development, expand its marketing activities and pursue partnerships with international certification bodies and ERP implementation partners.

"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" - Siska Lannoo, co-founder backbone

Funding video

Some celebrate a funding round with champagne we celebrated ours with throwing our CEO out of a plane.

Why? Over the past few months, food companies kept telling us the same thing “We need this yesterday.” The signal was clear, we needed to move even faster. So the team made a pact with our CEO. Raise €4M over summer and you jump.

A deal is a deal. Enjoy the video!

About Backbone

Backbone is the operating system for quality and compliance in the food industry. The company was founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel. Backbone automates the daily quality operations of food producers, from supplier tracking and document control to incident management and compliance analysis. Early customers include Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro, Euromeat, Budelpack, Royal Taste and J&K Confectionery.