The Belgian startup has secured €4 million in capital to launch its AI “quality cockpit” for the food industry.
When the Ghent-based startup's funding round first launched, co-founder and CEO Louis Opsomer agreed with his team that he would jump out of a plane if they reached their target. So, to mark the successful close of Backbone’s pre-seed funding round recently, the team went skydiving. “This funding takes us to a new altitude,” a statement by the company read. “It’s the fuel to solve a massive industry problem.”
Led by Antwerp-located early-stage venture capital firm Pitchdrive, with participation from existing Brussels-based investor 100IN and a consortium of families from Belgium’s food industry – including Agristo, Darta and Jules Destrooper – the funding round received a lot of support from local investors who have all been saying “we need this yesterday”.
“We’ve known Louis Opsomer, Siska Lannoo and Julien [surname] for years through Henchman and Rydoo, and worked closely with them as the idea for Backbone took shape. So, by the time it launched, our conviction was already firmly built,” Pitchdrive noted. The trio previously worked closely together on the Henchman management team, where Louis led operations and fundraising until its exit to LexisNexis, Siska (Backbone’s CCO) built partner-led growth, and Julien Steel (Backbone’s CPO) scaled enterprise products from MVP to maturity as CPO. Louis and Siska also both share a history at Showpad, where they were responsible for growing revenue operations and partnerships, respectively. Before joining Henchman, Julien was a product leader at Rydoo.
In fact, it was Henchman’s founders – Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker – who first recognised the startup’s value and provided initial capital through their investment fund 100IN.
"Backbone isn't just fixing quality management in food and beverages – they are setting a completely new standard for the industry by using the power of AI,” echoes Pitchdrive co-founder and general partner, Boris Bogaert.
“The speed, execution, and deep domain obsession of this team are unlike anything we've seen. They're building the modern nervous system for global manufacturing, and leading this round was an absolute conviction call for us.”
British funds, PROfounders Capital and Passion Capital, have also spotted the potential.
Building a quality cockpit
With 80 percent of food producers still managing their operations using institutional memory and manual processes, Excel files, Word documents, or email, teams are spending a lot of time manually verifying specifications, certifications and regulatory requirements across countless documents. “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, while quality knows the regulations and customer requirements,” explains Louis.
Backbone brings all of this data together into a single ecosystem, from laboratory analysis and supplier documentation to complex regulatory mandates. By automatically structuring and auditing this data against benchmarks such as IFS, BRCGS and FSSC 22000, the platform serves as a collective ‘quality cockpit’ that allows teams to instantly pinpoint non-conformities, query their internal data repositories and identify mission-critical priorities. Building upon this foundation, the startup is developing sophisticated AI agents designed to automate entire quality workflows. These digital assistants proactively monitor supplier certifications, validate incoming documentation against technical specifications, and systematically record incidents.
This way, food and beverage businesses can identify quality issues before they become a brand problem – which is rarely due to a single, disastrous mistake, but rather to minor deviations that are detected too late.
“We invested in Backbone because they are solving a real and growing challenge in the food industry,” comments Darta.
“Their AI platform empowers quality teams to focus less on administration and more on compliance, customer requirements, and improving quality. We believe Backbone has the potential to become a category leader in food quality technology.”
With the capital from the funding round, the company aims to expand its marketing activities, establish partnerships with international certification and ERP implementation bodies and further develop its software platform into a predictive operating system.
“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,” shares Siska. “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.”
Since its founding only a year ago (in 2025), Backbone has grown its customer base well beyond Belgium, to the UK and the Netherlands.
