Ex-Henchman team's Backbone raises €4M seed to automate food quality control
What's the deal? BackBone, a Belgian startup founded by former employees of Ghent-based Henchman, has raised €4 million in a seed round. It is building AI agents to digitise quality control in the food industry.
What's the endgame? The company aims to replace manual quality-management processes in the food sector with automated software. The fresh capital will fund that effort.
Why now? The founders bring experience from Henchman, a Ghent legal-tech firm, applying that background to a new domain. The round was announced in September 2026.
The signal: At €4 million, BackBone's seed sits in the 95th percentile of enterprise software seed rounds in Belgium, based on 240 comparable deals — a sign of investor appetite for applied AI in overlooked, process-heavy industries like food production.
Read more: tijd.be
Image credit: BackBone
