Our investment in Spore.Bio

This post was originally published on LinkedIn, November 2023.

Real-time detection of bacteria

• Bacterial detection is a huge consideration in the food and beverage sector as products can only be shipped when the bacterial samples come back all clear.
• Factories take samples as often as every hour and grow bacteria in petri dishes in labs on site or ship them off-site to external labs.
• Sampling typically takes between five and 20 days to come back, with significant knock-on impact in terms of time and costs.

Enter Spore:

• Spore.Bio has built the world’s first device for detecting pathogens in real-time, directly on the factory floor.
• Their device combines photonics and advanced machine learning models to train its system to identify the concentration of bacteria in food, drink, pharmaceuticals and cosmetic products before alerting quality managers to any potential risks.
• As always, it’s the Founders we’re excited to partner with: Amine Raji (founder, CEO): F&B manufacturing expert who has worked with more than 50 factories around the world including for Nestlé, Maxime Mistretta (founder, CTO): PhD and Postdoctorate from Pasteur Institute in Microbiology, and Mohamed Tazi (founder, COO): second-time founder who sold his previous company Gymlib to EGYM.
• Amine saw how complex it was to make consumer products safe, with an overreliance on century-old techniques that constrained efficiencies.
• They’re building an amazing and diverse team of world-class scientists and engineers across microbiology, machine learning, optics, photonics and chemometrics and have research partnerships in place with Institut de La Vision in France and CRA-W in Belgium.
• And Spore.Bio is on a tear. Even since we closed our investment in June, the company has made huge progress: the technology has reached the same limit of detection as PCR, and the company’s first customers have converted from POC to contract.

We love that this is a very hard company to build, including significant technology R&D risk, with applications in huge markets where there are already a number of very large European companies including Eurofins, Biomerieux and Biorad. And, of course in New Palo Alto: we’re proud that Spore is our 16th investment in Paris.

Huge thank you to Ramzi at NoLabel Ventures for introducing us to Amine, and we’re very excited to be joined by highly strategic funds and angels: Clarins Family Office, Plug&Play Ventures, Entrepreneur First, EmergingTech Ventures, Better Angle, Kima Ventures, Raise Sherpas, Fair Equity, and Sharpstone Capital, Mehdi Ghissassi and Dorothy Chou (Google DeepMind), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Eric Carreel (Withings), Richard Pennycook (The Co-operative Group), Charles Mussat (Rothschild & Co).