Who we are, and why we think the surfaces of a running line should not be dark.
Lumina is building the first distributed, real-time pathogen detection platform for food manufacturing. We put sensing and AI on the production floor, where contamination actually happens, instead of in a centralized lab that returns an answer days later.
The founding thesis is simple. Today's toolkit measures the wrong thing, or measures it too late. Culture takes three to five days. PCR is faster but still off the floor and still batch-scheduled. ATP is instant, but it reads organic residue, so it cannot tell you whether what it found is a pathogen. Bench-top Raman has the specificity and none of the reach. And a swab samples one point at one moment, so in between, the surfaces of a running line are effectively dark. That interval is what we are replacing with continuous measurement.
The stakes are not abstract. There are roughly 1,600 listeriosis cases and 260 deaths a year in the United States, almost all traced to contaminated ready-to-eat products. That is where we started. The ambition is a food system where that number is a historical statistic rather than an annual one.
The line keeps running while the culture plate incubates.
01 · The team
We are engineers with deep expertise in remote sensing, machine vision, and data analysis. Our founding team spent fifteen years building imaging and evidence systems for public safety: always on, unattended, and judged on uptime as much as accuracy. One was described as “the best investigative tool since DNA.”
Factories need the same capabilities. Production lines run around the clock, conditions are difficult to see in real time, and incidents are often reconstructed afterward from paper logs and disconnected systems. Lumina identifies risk as it emerges and automatically creates a reliable record along the way.
15 years
Building imaging and evidence systems for public safety.
30 years
Hyperspectral imaging, the last five-plus on bacterial detection.
95%
Detecting E. coli across product and equipment surfaces, 2024.
Atlanta
Georgia, United States. Venture-backed.
02 · How we work
When our system cannot ground an answer in your records, it says so rather than inventing one. In a field where a wrong answer becomes a liability decision, calibrated confidence is not modesty. It is the feature that makes an automated safety system usable at all.
We build and run our own models in our own environments. Your specs, SOPs, HACCP plans, and detection logs are not sent to a third-party AI API, and they are not training material for anyone else's model.
Lumina makes the environmental monitoring program you already run faster and better aimed: more of the plant watched, more often, by the same team. Confirmatory lab testing stays authoritative, so we are not asking you to take a regulatory risk to try something new.
03 · Talk to us
Today that surface gets swabbed on a schedule, and you find out what was living on it three days after the line ran. Watch it continuously and the signature shows up while it is still forming. The investigation opens itself, the corrective action arrives drafted with your own CFR references in the steps, and the record of all of it assembles as the work happens rather than the week before an audit.
We are ready to move your program from reacting after the fact to preventing while the line runs. Tell us which surface to start with.
