Spore.Bio raises $23M to cut microbiology testing to minutes from days using AI
Paris-based Spore.Bio, a startup that developed an artificial intelligence-driven method for detecting pathogens, said today it raised $23 million in early-stage funding to reinvent microbiology testing.
The company's Series A funding round was led by Singular and joined by Point 72, 1st Kind Ventures, Station F and Lord David Prior. Returning investors LocalGlobe, No Label Ventures and Famille C also joined. The round comes a year after the company raised €8 million in a pre-seed round, around $8.3 million, a little more than a year ago.
Founded in 2023, the company has developed a novel way to detect microbes and other contaminants on surfaces on food extremely quickly, speeding up microbiology testing. This can be critical for many industries such as food and beverage, which swab sites, send samples offsite to external labs and then receive reports back in typically five to 20 days. Spore.Bio reports that it's solution can provide results within minutes.
The company developed a specialized machine learning algorithm to read specific wavelengths of light reflected off samples taken from surfaces to be tested. Spore.Bio's AI model can then detect if a sample contains a particular bacterium or pathogen based on its deep learning capability.
"AI is nice for chatbots and LLMs, but some amazing, niche applications are paving the way of deep changes in certain industries, especially science-related industries," said Amine Raji, chief executive and co-founder of Spore.Bio. "We are proud of being an example of it, while having developed in only one year our proprietary AI-based technology that manages to do what existing technologies couldn't for two centuries."
The cost of a food or beverage recall can average around $10 million in direct costs, including product retrieval, disposal and related logistics. However, the total cost can go even higher when considering the press disaster that can often follow a salmonella outbreak or other large scale food poisoning. In 2023, the global food testing market was valued at $22.5 billion, according to market analysis firm Allied Market Research, and bacterial contamination represents a notable portion of that market.
Although the originally developed for food and beverage, Spore.Bio has also set its sights on expanding into similar industries that require microbiology contaminant testing such as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Spore.Bio said that it has plans to roll out to around 200 factories and opened up a waitlist for more with a full release by the end of 2025.
The company also secured a partnership with the Pasteur Institute, a leading global microbiology research center. The company said access to the Institute's biobank of bacterial samples will help expand Spore.Bio's AI model's pathogen detection capabilities.
With this funding, the company said that it plans to almost double its workforce to 50 scientists and engineers and scale up the industrialization of its process and prepare for the commercialization of its product by the end of the year.