PARIS, FRANCE — Food technology startup Spore.Bio is aiming to improve the way food and beverage manufacturers ensure the safety of their products.

The company’s technology uses artificial intelligence and is still in the early stages of development, but founder and chief executive officer Amine Raji said it will be ready for deployment by mid-2025.

“Our technology combines a photonics innovation with innovative deep learning models; we take a snapshot of lots of samples of a food product, contaminated and not, and train our algorithm to recognize the microorganism signature,” Raji said.

Coming off a recent pre-seed funding round, which raised $8 million and was led by London-based LocalGlobe VC, the company is working to bring its technology to the United States.

With the funds, the company will hire scientists, researchers, engineers and industrial teams. The company will focus its efforts on R&D to help deploy prototypes in processing plants, Raji said.

“We have some R&D roadblocks that we will focus on in 2024,” he said.

The company is currently working with food manufacturers to refine and improve the system.

“They send us samples to our labs, we train our machine learning models on them and validate the performance criteria on their products,” Raji said. “As soon as this phase will be done, they will be the first users of our technology directly on their sites.”

Raji has worked in the food and beverage industry, most recently at Nestle for the past five years.

With the technology, Raji hopes to provide faster results to manufacturers.

“Most of them don’t necessarily have microbiology labs in-house,” he said. “So, what they do is they take samples and send them to external labs, and then wait days and days before getting their results. This puts them in really complex situations, because they have to put their products in the market before having their microbiological results. Then, if the results come out positive, they have to organize recalls. This technology would allow them to do tests on site and have the results within seconds.”