How Orbem is bringing MRI and AI into food inspection
Image: Orbem
Magnetic resonance imaging, better known as MRI, is normally associated with hospitals and medical diagnostics. Munich-based startup Orbem has adapted the same technology for industrial food inspection and agricultural analysis, combining MRI scanning and AI-powered image analysis to look inside eggs, seeds, avocados and watermelons at an industrial scale. The company says its systems can analyse biological materials internally in less than one second without cutting products open or requiring human inspection, opening a myriad of potential applications across food production, agriculture and life sciences.
What Orbem is doing isn't completely new: beyond clinical use, researchers have used MRI for years in food science laboratories to analyse moisture distribution, ripeness, and internal biological structures in products ranging from grains and dairy to fruit and vegetables. Historically, however, MRI systems remained too slow, expensive, and operationally complex for industrial-scale deployment.
Orbem says advances in AI processing and hardware engineering are now changing that equation.
From eggs to avocados
Orbem emerged from research conducted at the Technical University of Munich and was founded in 2019 by Dr Pedro Gómez, Dr Miguel Molina Romero and Dr Maria Laparidou. Two years later, in January 2026, the company raised €55.5 million in Series B funding. in a round led by Dutch deeptech investor Innovation Industries, with participation from Supernova Invest, General Catalyst, 83North and The Venture Collective. The company said at the time that the funding would support international expansion and additional applications across food production and healthcare.
Orbem initially gained traction in the poultry industry, where its technology is used to determine the sex of a chick embryo while still inside the egg.
The sector faces a longstanding challenge involving male chicks. In egg-laying breeds, male chicks do not produce eggs and are generally unsuitable for meat production. Millions are therefore culled globally each year shortly after hatching, a practice that has faced increasing ethical and regulatory scrutiny.
Countries including Germany and France have introduced restrictions on chick culling, creating pressure for alternatives.
Addressing this issue, Orbem's MRI-based systems can analyse eggs during incubation and identify biological characteristics before hatching without damaging the egg. The company developed the technology together with poultry equipment specialist Vencomatic Group. To date, Orbem technology has scanned more than 170 million eggs across commercial hatcheries in five European countries - proving the technology's commercial viability at scale.
Orbem is now applying the same imaging infrastructure to fruit inspection. In May 2026, agricultural producer JimboFresh became the first watermelon producer to use the company’s AI-powered MRI system to inspect fruit “from skin to core." The technology can identify internal bruising, over-ripeness and impact damage that conventional external inspection methods may miss. “We give humans the ability to look inside nature,” as Orbem co-founder Gómez has been quoted.
In addition to watermelons, Orbem has discussed expanding MRI analysis to avocados and other produce where internal quality defects are difficult to detect externally. Fruit quality is often assessed through colour, shape and surface appearance even though internal bruising or ripeness problems may remain invisible until products reach retailers or consumers.
That creates a commercial problem involving rejected shipments, inconsistent quality and food waste.
Orbem argues that MRI-based inspection can improve consistency by analysing internal biological structures directly rather than relying primarily on sampling or external appearance.
“A first for the watermelon industry,” Johann Steinert of Orbem wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the JimboFresh partnership. “When a producer at the scale of JimboFresh commits to non-destructive quality control, the standard for an entire sector shifts.”
Turning biological materials into industrial data
Factories already use machine-vision systems to inspect manufactured products for microscopic defects. Similar approaches are increasingly being applied to agriculture, food production and biotechnology.
Biological materials, however, are far less uniform than industrial components.
Eggs, fruit, seeds and plant materials vary naturally in shape, composition and internal structure. Analysing them at an industrial scale requires imaging systems capable of handling high variability while still producing consistent results.
That is where AI becomes central to Orbem’s approach.
The company says its software models analyse MRI scans and identify patterns that would be difficult or impractical to process manually. Orbem refers to this process as “deep phenotyping”, meaning the analysis of biological traits through imaging and data processing.
The company also argues that repeated MRI analysis of biological materials is helping it build a large proprietary dataset linking internal structures to quality, fertility and developmental characteristics. Orbem says that data could eventually support additional applications across food production and healthcare.
Other companies are also exploring industrial MRI and deep imaging
“We’re the first and so far only company in the world to demonstrate the use of MRI in less than one second and without humans in the loop,” Gómez said following the company’s Series B funding round.
Orbem is nevertheless entering an increasingly competitive market for biological inspection technologies.
Dutch startup In Ovo and Germany’s Seleggt are also developing systems designed to reduce chick culling through embryo analysis and in-ovo sexing technologies. Their systems, however, rely on different biological testing and imaging methods rather than MRI itself.
Several companies are also exploring adjacent imaging technologies.
French startup Chipiron is developing compact MRI systems for healthcare applications, aiming to reduce the size and cost of MRI hardware itself. France-based TiHive is developing terahertz imaging systems for industrial inspection and quality control, while Israeli startup Inspecto Technologies uses hyperspectral imaging for food analysis and contamination detection.
Will Orbem's MRI/AI model scale even further, and across different industry verticals? The company certainly seems to be heading in the right direction, having established its first US office in Houston, Texas to serve as the hub for its international and North American operations.
It makes sense for the company to bring its non-invasive quality-control scanners to the US fruit and vegetable industry as this is a massive, highly synchronized economic powerhouse valued at roughly $400 billion. What also bodes well for Orbem is that the US poultry industry is adopting 'Hatch Check' certifications and is actively looking for technologies that improve operational efficiency and transparency. American poultry farmers will consider with interest the fact that Orbem's technology delivers an impressive 15–25% efficiency gain in operational performance.
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