- Backbone has secured €4 million to help food companies move away from using Excel and email for quality management.
- Pitchdrive was at the forefront of the funding round shortly after Europe’s largest baby formula recall.
- The same investors who backed the earlier exit of the founders’ previous company are now supporting them.
Louis Opsomer co-founded the legal drafting startup Henchman and then sold it to LexisNexis in 2024. A year and a half later, baby formula recalls occurred in over 60 countries due to a contaminated ingredient, revealing the same fragmented safety data problems he had dealt with in the legal industry.
Backbone, his new company, raised €4 million in a pre-seed funding round, with Pitchdrive at the helm, to help food producers address this issue.
The company, headquartered in Brussels, consolidates the supplier certificates, laboratory results, and internal records that food producers currently store in Excel, Word and email. It states that 80% of producers still use these tools and that delays in identifying quality problems can result in losses of up to 15% of revenue.
PROfounders Capital, a London-based venture firm founded by Brent Hoberman and known for investing in Made.com and GetYourGuide, took part in the financing. Passion Capital, which was the first institutional investor to invest in Monzo, GoCardless, and Tide, also invested alongside 100IN and a number of Belgian food families, including Agristo and Darta.
“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 Opsomer.
A quality issue that became global
This development occurs at the same time as Europe’s most serious infant formula scandal in recent years. Beginning in December 2025, cereulide toxin from a contaminated ingredient sourced from China entered a formula produced by Nestlé, Danone, and Lactalis.
As a result, there were recalls in more than 60 countries and cases of illness among infants in seven countries, including Belgium. The contamination went undetected for weeks as it moved through various manufacturers’ supply chains, highlighting the fragmented quality data Backbone aims to address.
The global market for food safety management software is projected to increase from $599 million in 2021 to over $2.1 billion by 2033, driven by rising recall costs and increasing certification requirements from IFS, BRCGS, and FSSC 22000.
The Henchman team’s second startup
Opsomer founded Backbone in October 2025 together with Siska Lannoo and Julien Steel. The three of them had been managers at Henchman, the Ghent legal-tech startup which LexisNexis acquired in 2024.
Lannoo and Opsomer had also worked together at Showpad, Lannoo being based in London and Opsomer in San Francisco. While working at Henchman, they noticed that the manual, fragmented process of document review hindered law firms and decided to address a similar issue in a different industry.
The initial funding for Backbone came from Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker, the founders of Henchman. They used part of the money they had received from their exit to invest in 100IN, a €12 million pre-seed fund, and to back Backbone, even though it did not yet have a product in 2025. 100IN also took part in the current funding round.
“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,” Lannoo added.
Competing through integration, not documentation
Backbone is entering a market which already has some well-established but less well-known competitors.
FoodDocs from Estonia offers a tool for food safety documentation and HACCP planning that is used by over 7,000 customers, yet it has raised only $2.4 million since 2019. The company is focused on producing compliance paperwork rather than linking it across departments. Polysense, based in Ghent, raised $10.7 million from Felix Capital in July, with 100IN also taking part. It employs computer vision to detect defects on the factory floor rather than looking for them in post-production paperwork.
Backbone believes that neither of these methods fully addresses the problem, and the company intends to combine information from labs, suppliers, and auditors to identify any issues before a faulty batch is shipped.
The new money will be used for marketing and for product development; this will involve working with certification bodies and Microsoft as the company proceeds with Copilot integration. Backbone aims to be operating in 250 production sites by the end of 2028, provided that food producers are willing to have an AI system carry out a role which will still require human supervision by regulators.
It is likely that quality teams will decide whether to trust the software to detect contaminated batches before shipping based more on the outcomes of future recalls than on the technology itself.
