In a world where consumer product safety is increasingly critical, a French DeepTech startup is transforming how manufacturers detect potentially dangerous bacterial contamination. Spore.Bio has developed an AI-powered technology that can identify bacteria in minutes rather than days, potentially saving companies millions in recall costs while protecting public health.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Paris, Spore.Bio has rapidly emerged as a pioneer in microbiology testing, securing an impressive $31.3 million in funding in just over a year. Its revolutionary approach combines advanced photonics, machine learning, and spectroscopy to provide on-site testing capabilities for food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic manufacturers.
The Problem: Centuries-Old Testing Methods
For CEO Amine Raji, the genesis of Spore.Bio came from firsthand experience with the reality of modern manufacturing: Despite technological advances in nearly every aspect of production, bacterial testing remained stubbornly antiquated.
"I was at Nestlé, and the frustration that I had was, how come we're in 2022 and we still have to wait five days to know if the batches that we're producing are contaminated or not?" Raji explained in a recent interview.
The industry standard for microbiological testing has changed little since Louis Pasteur's era. Manufacturers must send samples to external laboratories where technicians grow bacterial cultures in petri dishes – a process requiring 5-14 days depending on the product type. This creates an impossible choice: delay shipments while awaiting results (incurring substantial inventory costs) or risk releasing potentially contaminated products.
The consequences are severe. Product recalls have increased by 20% in 2024 alone, with each incident costing manufacturers an average of $10 million in direct expenses, not including long-term brand damage and consumer trust erosion.
Light and AI Replace Petri Dishes
Spore.Bio's breakthrough technology eliminates the need for bacterial cultures by using precision light wavelengths to capture unique spectral signatures from samples. Their sophisticated machine-learning algorithms, trained on hundreds of thousands of bacterial signatures, analyze these patterns to identify contaminants with remarkable accuracy.
"What we're doing at Spore.Bio is building a device that can spot them at this microscopic level without growth, so really directly at the single cell level," Raji explained.
The result is a quantum leap in efficiency: bacterial contamination detection in approximately 10 minutes rather than days or weeks. Even more remarkable, the system operates at a lower cost than traditional methods.
"We're competing against methods that are way more expensive than us," Raji noted. "They use consumables, actual physical chemicals, dyes, DNA, or whatever,l that costs quite a lot of money. For us, we use only electricity and the light that we use to detect those bacteria."
This technological edge translates into a powerful value proposition for manufacturers across multiple industries. By bringing advanced detection capabilities directly to factory floors, companies can implement truly proactive quality control, identifying contamination issues in real time before products leave facilities.
The Founding Team: Complementary Expertise
Spore.Bio was established by three entrepreneurs with complementary skills essential for tackling complex challenges in microbiology and manufacturing:
- Amine Raji (CEO): A food and beverage manufacturing engineer with six years of experience at Nestlé, giving him firsthand knowledge of quality control challenges in industrial settings. Amine holds a degree in Physics from Lycee Janson-de-Sailly, and a Master’s degree at ParisTech in Industrial and Mechanical Engineering.
- Maxime Mistretta (CTO): Brings deep scientific expertise through his PhD and postdoc in microbiology from the prestigious Institut Pasteur, paired with a Master's degree in Biology. He spent many years in advanced research labs looking at bacterial science.
- Mohamed Tazi (COO): A second-time entrepreneur who previously founded and successfully sold his company Gymlib to EGYM, providing vital business development and operational experience. Mohamed began his career at Deloitte in the Audit department.
The company was incubated at Entrepreneur First. This foundation at a prestigious startup accelerator provided initial support and validation, helping the founders refine their business model and technological approach.
Wooing Investors
Spore.Bio has attracted substantial investment in an incredibly short timeframe. The company's funding journey began with an $8.3 million pre-seed round in December 2023 led by LocalGlobe, providing the initial capital needed to develop prototypes and validate the technology's core capabilities.
This was followed by an oversubscribed $23 million Series A round in February 2025, led by European venture capital firm Singular, representing one of the largest early-stage funding rounds for a European DeepTech startup in the microbiology space. The round included participation from Point72 Ventures, 1st Kind Ventures (the Peugeot family office), and Famille C (the Clarins family office), among others.
"The round was preempted," Raji said. "We were not expecting to do a Series A right now, and so this gave us kind of the idea of moving even quicker and delivering even more and being extremely ambitious."
Expanding Beyond Food Safety
While initially focused on food and beverage manufacturing, Spore.Bio has identified significant applications in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries, where contamination issues present unique challenges that are well-suited to their technology.
"The more we were producing, the more we realized that the most inbounds and the real need in the market were maybe more in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic fields," Raji said.
In pharmaceuticals, the technology is particularly valuable for innovative treatments such as gene and cell therapies, which often have extremely short shelf lives—sometimes as brief as seven days.
"Imagine you're producing something that has a seven-day shelf life, and to make sure that there is no bacteria in it, you have to wait 14 days," Raji noted. "Today, before giving back those cells to patients, they have to sign paperwork saying that potentially, the product has been contaminated with bacteria and they can die of sepsis. So that's why there's a big need for those alternative methods that are quicker in those industries."
Commercial Traction and Growth Plans
Despite being founded just two years ago, Spore.Bio has signed contracts that could potentially cover implementations in up to 200 factories, creating a substantial order backlog that necessitated the creation of a customer waitlist.
Spore.Bio has also secured a strategic partnership with the Institut Pasteur, one of the world's leading microbiology research institutions, providing access to its extensive bacterial strain library—a relationship that significantly enhances the company's ability to train and refine its detection algorithms.
With the Series A funding secured, Spore.Bio is transitioning from research and development to commercial scale manufacturing and deployment. The company plans to double its workforce from 25 to 50 employees by the end of 2025, focusing on scaling up industrialization, continuing to iterate with existing customers, and preparing for broader commercialization.
Additionally, given significant interest from US-based companies, Spore.Bio is considering opening an American office on the East Coast in the near future, which would support its international expansion while providing closer proximity to key customers in the Midwest and New Jersey.
For Raji and his team, Spore.Bio represents an example of how AI can transform specific industries beyond the more publicized applications like chatbots and large language models.
"AI is nice for chatbots and LLMs, but some amazing, niche applications are paving the way for deep changes in certain industries, especially science-related industries," Raji stated. "We are proud to be an example of it by having developed in only one year our proprietary AI-based technology that manages to do what existing technologies couldn't for two centuries."
