Investment: “Backbone raises €4 million”
Backbone, a Brussels-based AI OS for quality and compliance in the food industry, has raised €4 million in a pre-Seed round led by Pitchdrive to expand its marketing activities and invest further in product development.
The round included participation from PROfounders Capital and Passion Capital, alongside existing investor 100IN and a consortium of Belgian food families, including Agristo and Darta.
Backbone was founded in 2025 by Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel, three former Henchman managers. The company automates daily quality operations for food producers, covering supplier tracking, document control, incident management and compliance analysis, and has expanded its customer base beyond Belgium into the UK and the Netherlands.
The platform aggregates quality-related data—supplier documents, lab results and regulatory requirements—automatically structures it and checks it against standards such as IFS, BRCGS and FSSC 22000, creating a shared quality brain for organisations. On top of that layer, Backbone is building AI agents that track supplier certificates, check incoming lab results and documents against current specifications and log incidents automatically, all surfaced in a central quality cockpit for management. Customers include Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro, Euromeat, Budelpack, Royal Taste and J&K Confectionery, and Backbone recently partnered with AMNorman.
The company says the funding will be used to expand marketing and accelerate product development as it scales, with a target to have Backbone running across 250 production sites by the end of 2028.
“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. 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,” said Louis Opsomer. “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,” added Siska Lannoo.
