Former managers at Belgian LegalTech scale-up Henchman are launching Backbone, an AI platform for real-time quality and compliance management in the food industry.
A recipe change at a food manufacturer triggers an immediate cascade of quality checks. Regulatory requirements around food safety have intensified sharply in recent years, and compliance now spans the entire organisation, from procurement and R&D to production and business development. Yet most of that oversight still runs on manual processes.
In practice, every supplier switch, product launch or incoming raw material delivery means manually cross-referencing certificates and specs, typically across Excel sheets, Word documents and email threads. Without real-time visibility, mismatches can go undetected until a product is already in production or worse, on the shelf.
Backbone's founders estimate that poor quality costs the food sector up to 15% of revenue, excluding reputational damages. The culprit is rarely a single critical failure, but an accumulation of small deviations caught too late. The recent wave of baby food incidents has put a sharp edge on what those numbers actually mean in practice.
From certificate-driven to real-time quality
Backbone addresses the problem by centralising and automatically analysing data that already exists inside organisations, from supplier documentation and lab results to internal procedures. "The data is usually already there, but scattered across systems or locked in people's heads," says co-founder Louis Opsomer. "We make that information usable for day-to-day decisions."
"Many companies still operate reactively, treating certificates as their quality benchmark, but a certificate is just a snapshot," he adds. “Backbone goes well beyond audit: rather than verifying compliance after the fact, it surfaces risks continuously. Besides, the time saved on administration frees quality managers to focus on what actually moves the needle.”
Seed funding
Lannoo and Opsomer first worked together at Showpad, the Belgian B2B software company, where Lannoo was based in London and Opsomer in San Francisco, both contributing to its international growth trajectory. They later joined Henchman's management team, where they gained direct exposure to how fragmented and error-prone compliance workflows remain today, and how significant the gap is between current practice and what modern AI tooling can realistically deliver, particularly in food manufacturing.
Backbone closed a seed round several months ago, with backing from the 100IN fund of serial entrepreneurs Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker, at a pre-product stage. The platform is now operational across multiple production sites, and the team is handling inbound interest from both domestic and international prospects. Early customers include Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro and Euromeat.
The capital will fund commercial expansion and continued product development. Backbone is also establishing partnerships with international standards bodies including BRCGS, and technology partners such as Microsoft, with integrations into Copilot among the initiatives under development.
"This is a global problem, and the inbound demand confirms that," says Siska Lannoo. "The food industry is moving towards predictive systems that surface risks before they materialise. We are helping companies make that transition now. In AI, speed is a competitive advantage, but without deep domain expertise, you cannot build something that holds up at scale. That combination is what Backbone brings to the table."