Chemometric Brain, a new software company for quality control in the food industry, opens its first funding round aiming at raising €10m to €30m to develop its growth plan.
The company is a unique quality control system based on Near Infrared technology (NIR) to guarantee the traceability, suitability and homogeneity of ingredients and food products, especially in recipes containing multiple ingredients.
It was originally created as proprietary software of Blendhub, the first global network for food production through multi-localised production hubs; in January 2020 it separated from Blendhub into a completely independent organisation due to significant interest from a large number of organisations in the sector to adopt the technology into their own companies and their suppliers.
The company expects to sell a minority stake (around 10 per cent) to strategic investors with expertise in traceability, quality certification and food security.
The purpose is to close this first funding round before September and open a second one around 18 to 24 months later.
The company’s strategic plan for the next five years estimates revenues of €200m by the end of 2025 and more than 5,000 customers, since the company expects to make this advanced software accessible to more than 500 million SMEs in the global food industry.
In this process, the company is working with Violy and Company as financial advisors.
A pioneering own software, the only one in the cloud
The company’s software, based on NIR technology, can be used to identify raw materials, detect possible changes in suppliers’ processes, ensure the exact mixture composition, better determine the expected product shelf-life or analyse physical-chemical properties, amongst others.
The major difference between NIR solutions already available and Chemometric Brain is that this is the only software in the cloud, and it allows a company to consolidate all NIR spectra (the results of the analysis) from multiple devices and multiple equipment manufacturers in one single place.
In addition, when creating libraries of a specific recipe with a minor ingredient, which could for example, contain a peanut powder which is a well-known allergen, qualitative analysis tools can be applied using machine learning/AI and in the near future end customers could use a NIR machine to confirm that a food item does not containing any trace levels of peanut down to a few milligrams.
Given the global issues with food authenticity and complicated or broken supply chains the company provides a simple to use highly innovative cloud-based solution which can be implemented very quickly in a matter of days.
Founder of Chemometric Brain, Henrik Stamm Kristensen said, “The development of a sustainable, safe and secure agrifood value chain with the participation of all stakeholders from seed-to-mouth, has been my main objective since I founded my first food tech start-up back in 1997.”
“And after years of development, library creations and validation by selected ingredients suppliers and food producers I am extremely excited about the launch of Chemometric Brain being my first ever independent SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform company which in the next few years will benefit thousands of companies in creating a completely new level of traceability, security and prediction in their individual supply chains,” he added.