Spore.Bio Accelerates Fight Against Pathogens
In the heart of Paris, near where Louis Pasteur did his ground-breaking work in microbiology, the founder of Spore.Bio is looking to write a new chapter in the fight against deadly pathogens.
Amine Raji is a Moroccan entrepreneur with extensive experience in the food and beverage industry. In fact, it was after witnessing the impact of a deadly contamination outbreak that Raji was inspired to discover more efficient and effective ways to fight microbial contamination, which still claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
Spore.Bio’s technology uses a combination of biophotonics and advanced machine learning techniques to identify the spectral signatures of different microorganisms. What that means is that instead of having to wait five days for bacteria to grow on a Petri dish, Spore.Bio can identify pathogens in as little as 10 minutes.
In February 2026, Spore.Bio unveiled its TMSI Platform, a world-first AI that can detect, quantify, and identify live microorganisms in just 10 minutes. To celebrate this milestone, we look back at Amine’s “Voices that Matter” conversation, which features as part of the Red Book series.
Q How does a Moroccan with a background in the food and beverage industry end up founding a deep tech in Paris to take on a seemingly intractable problem?
A I’ve always had a passion for entrepreneurship that came through my dad. He runs traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses back in Casablanca.
So I always knew I wanted to build something on my own. Then I was working in the food and beverage industry for Nestlé when a big crisis hit – a food recall that had huge consequences, including the death of several children.
I woke up one day and thought this is the issue I wanted to solve.
Q How does Spore.Bio’s technology work?
A We’re using biophotonics and machine learning. We have built a machine that shines light on a sample to see how the sample will react with the biological matter. Every microorganism, bacteria, yeast and mould have their own inner spectral signature. We’re training a huge machine learning model over the last two and a half years to recognise the spectral patterns for all the bacteria. And that’s how we can have a reliable test in only 10 minutes, instead of the five days that you typically need in the industry.
Q Detecting pathogens sounds like the job of public health bodies. What convinced you that there was an opportunity to disrupt the status quo?
A In my previous work, I spent time working in more than 50 food and beverage factories all around the world, from Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. You go to any factory and everything is lean, optimised and streamlined except for when you have to wait for bacteria to grow on a Petri dish, which is a vintage, 19th century process. I was like, ‘How come no one solved this already?’.
Q You recently wrote an op-ed for The Microbiologist paper saying that “Over the past 40 years, many have attempted to bring innovation to this space, but their success was limited by complexity and the scale of the challenge.” What has changed to give you hope that real transformation is possible now?
A The first one is technological momentum. With all the progress that’s been made on the physics side, with photonics and especially on reinforcement learning models that we’re using, we can do some really amazing stuff that was previously not possible. The second thing is mindset. This is a niche, technical and complex topic. The people trying to solve the problem for the last 40 years were pure scientists. We at Spore.Bio spend more time on the factory floor than in our own lab.
Q Julia Hawkins, the General Partner at Phoenix Court, who led the pre-seed and Series A investments for LocalGlobe has said what’s really impressive about Spore.Bio is that they’re a deep tech that operates at the velocity of a software company. How do you manage to do that given how entrenched existing practices are?
A We take bold risks. I’ll give you an example. To build the first working prototype for any company at my stage would have typically taken four, five or six years of working alone in a lab, then iterating, developing the technology, and stress testing it before putting it in the hands of a customer. But after five years, how would you know if what you’re building is going to find a market? It was also a personal thing. I didn’t want to spend five years alone in a lab! (laughs)
“There are eight million people hospitalised every year because of microbiological contamination and 480,000 deaths as a result. I strongly believe that in the 21st Century, that’s not something that should happen anymore.”
Q Spore.Bio currently has nine customers and is doing proof of concept trials. What can you tell me about those companies and the potential of your technology to transform their businesses?
A These are some of the biggest food and beverage, pharma and cosmetic companies in the world, so S&P 500 companies or CAC 40 names. The products that you consume at the retail store or at the pharmacy, most of them are supplied by those companies. They have huge quality control or productivity pain points linked to the problem that we’re solving. They’re desperately searching for new alternatives and that’s why they’re working with Spore.Bio.
Q Tell me about the experience of working with Julia Hawkins at LocalGlobe and the rest of the team at Phoenix Court.
A It’s been amazing. Julia told me something at the beginning. She promised to be 100% hands off until I asked her not to be. That’s something that I really value: the freedom, the trust and confidence that I can take all the risks needed to build this business. But once I have a topic that needs to be discussed or a big strategic decision, the amount of resources, focus and energy that Julia and the whole LocalGlobe team managed to put behind us within 24 hours is simply incredible. The Series A was a great example. I talked to Julia, Suzanne, Saul – nearly all the partners at LocalGlobe. They shared insights, things that they heard, good practices and things I should avoid, etc. It really made me think. A few days later, other offers came in with better partners. The guidance from LocalGlobe during this period was simply amazing. Without them, things could have gone very differently.
Q What have been Spore.Bio’s most meaningful milestones so far?
A The first breakthrough was proving that the technology works. We did a huge validation study comparing our alternative technique and the traditional methods. That was months and months of studies and comparison. That was a huge milestone for us in early 2025. Another one that is really critical for us was the first big enterprise company that signed a commercial contract to equip 100% of their factories all around the world using our technology. That shows that it’s not only the potential of our technology, but they tried it, were happy and agreed to equip all their factories with it. The last one is the partnership that we signed a few months ago with Institute Pasteur, the most renowned microbiology academic centre in the world. They have the biggest bio bank of bacteria in the world.
Imagine a huge bank of millions of strains of bacteria stored at minus 80 degrees. We signed a partnership to work together to use this bio bank to train our machine learning model, which makes us today the world’s biggest spectral library of bacteria in the world, in only two and a half years. And so as an asset for the company we’re building, we feel way more defensible and stronger on our feet.
Q What’s your current focus?
A It’s to deliver dozens or even hundreds of machines to our customers all around the world. We have more than 200 factories currently waiting to receive our technology.
Q If you look ahead 10 years, how much will have changed in the realm of microbiology and how much of that do you see being down to Spore.Bio?
A What’s really exciting is that if you look at any big market, from taxis to hotels or whatever, you’ve had one venture backed setup that managed to change how things are done. Uber for taxis, Airbnb for hotels. Microbiology testing is a huge $30 billion market worldwide. No one has disrupted it. Big old incumbent labs own the market. Spore.Bio is two years old. We’re the first heavily venture backed company with strong technological assets with the aim of becoming one of those leaders in the (microbiology) category, and we’re not going to stop until we reach that point.
Q What is your ultimate goal?
A There are eight million people hospitalised every year because of microbiological contamination and 480,000 deaths as a result. Just because they go to the local store, buy a sandwich and it’s potentially contaminated.
That could be you, me or your children. I strongly believe that in the 21st Century, that’s not something that should happen anymore. We have reliable systems that could avoid that and new technologies that will help manufacturers prevent that.
My goal is before I die, seeing this number go to zero.