ByAlex Knapp,
Forbes Staff. Alex Knapp is a Forbes senior editor covering healthcare and science.
for The Prototype
Oct 10, 2025, 11:30am EDT
Detecting contamination from toxins and bacteria is a challenge for healthcare systems and food preparation companies alike. That’s both because of the complexity of microscopic threats and the slow, labor-intensive nature of the lab work to test for them.
This was a lesson Matt Theurer learned at the height of the Covid pandemic, before rapid testing was available. “We all remember waiting in line for hours to get swabbed and then getting results two or three days later,” he said. “It was too slow, too centralized and too expensive.”
It’s a problem his company, Hyperspectral, aims to solve. Founded in 2022 by Theurer (CEO), Lauren Stack (COO) and Vince Lubsey (CTO), it aims to use spectrography and AI to rapidly detect potentially dangerous microorganisms or chemicals. This week, the company raised a $7 million series A extension, bringing its total funding to about $15.5 million. The valuation was undisclosed.
Spectrography is based on a simple principle: when you shine certain frequencies of light at different objects, it uniquely reflects or absorbs them. This enables scientists to identify and classify different substances. Hyperspectral’s AI models are trained on such data from thousands of pathogens, enabling its software to quickly identify potential contamination in a sample in minutes.
With the new capital in hand, Theuer says his company is “coming out of beta testing,” and working to bring its “science as a service” into the hands of its first customers. “And then we’re setting ourselves up to scale,” he added.