Leiria-based BRAINR built the manufacturing execution system its founder could not buy, and it now runs the software behind nearly a third of Portugal's meat production.
A Leiria-based startup called BRAINR now sits inside the software stack of factories that process nearly a third of all meat produced in Portugal.
For decades, food manufacturing has been one of the least digitized corners of industry, a world of paper checklists, Excel spreadsheets, and warehouse managers doing traceability lookups by hand. BRAINR built a cloud-native platform to replace that entirely, and in barely two years it went from prototype to what its founders call the operating system for an entire national industry. The company's growth is not a story about a clever app finding a niche. It is a story about a single piece of infrastructure becoming load-bearing for how a country feeds itself, and about what happens when a founder who spent a decade inside the industry decides the software he needed simply did not exist.
BRAINR's origin story runs through Grupo Lusiaves, one of the largest vertically integrated poultry groups on the Iberian Peninsula, founded in 1986 and now comprising more than 40 companies, over 5,600 employees, and revenue above 465 million euros a year. Around 2015 and 2016, Paulo Gaspar led Lusiaves' digital transformation, building an IT department from scratch to untangle a group that was, in his words, running more than 30 different ERP systems and over 200 separate software applications at once. Gaspar has said the group left the hardest problem for last: a true manufacturing execution system built for how meat factories actually operate, with short shelf lives, constantly shifting recipes, and compliance requirements that cannot bend.
Gaspar spun that internal system out as BRAINR at the end of 2023, debuting it at Web Summit, alongside cofounders Rui Batista as chief operating officer, who brought more than two decades of ERP experience, and Ricardo Granada as chief technology officer, who brought roughly 25 years in industrial software. The founding team's pitch to the market has been unusually direct: they were the buyers who got burned by traditional MES vendors before they became the vendor. Gaspar has described sitting through implementations that took two years and still failed to deliver real visibility, and built BRAINR's entire deployment model in reaction to that experience, aiming to solve one painful workflow within a week of first contact rather than promising a year-long transformation.
The traction curve has been unusually steep for industrial software, a category that normally rewards patience over speed. In September 2025, when BRAINR closed its seed round, the company said its platform already managed more than 25 percent of Portugal's meat production. By the following summer, when Portugal Ventures added a follow-on investment, BRAINR said its system was used by manufacturers responsible for more than 65 percent of the country's poultry production specifically, with total platform reach now described as covering roughly a third of Portugal's meat industry overall and more than 1.3 billion euros in annual food production value flowing through it.
The clearest evidence sits inside individual plants. At Avisabor, a poultry processor in Estarreja, BRAINR says the platform helped scale daily throughput from 40,000 to a peak of 190,000 birds while cutting average warehouse holding time in half; the plant now runs 35 production lines, roughly 5,200 batches and 1,000 production orders a month, and more than 350 SKUs through the same software that first went live at a fraction of that volume, with delivery failures down 90 percent. At Campoaves, a leading free-range chicken producer processing more than 100,000 birds daily across several species while juggling Halal, Organic, and IFS certifications, BRAINR says it automated 92 percent of production data entry and cut a traceability report that used to take two days down to under 60 seconds, a reduction in reporting time of roughly 95 percent alongside a 94 percent drop in shipping errors. A third Lusiaves-group plant, Comave, used the platform to reach IFS certification in record time.
It is worth naming the pattern in those reference cases plainly: Avisabor and Campoaves are both part of Grupo Lusiaves, the same group where Gaspar built the platform's predecessor before spinning the company out. That gave BRAINR an unusually cooperative first customer and a testing ground it understood intimately, which helps explain how quickly the product matured. It also means the industry's most-cited proof points to date come substantially from one related group of factories rather than from a wide field of unaffiliated operators, a distinction that matters as BRAINR pushes into markets where it has no such built-in relationship.
BRAINR's 11 million euro seed round, led by C2 Capital Partners and closed in September 2025, was structured on a milestone basis rather than delivered as a single lump sum, according to legal advisers on the deal, and it stood as the largest seed round in Portuguese history at the time. Then in mid-2026, BRAINR came back for a 1.5 million euro extension from Portugal Ventures, capital the company has said it did not originally plan to raise. Cofounder Ricardo Granada framed the return trip plainly on LinkedIn: the market was moving faster than expected. Portugal Ventures, for its part, described BRAINR as a company with a differentiating solution and a strong international vocation, language that signals a state-linked investor betting on BRAINR as a national champion rather than a niche vendor.
That framing matters because BRAINR is not without competition. Established players including SAP, Aptean, Infor, JustFoodERP, and Deacom already sell manufacturing execution and ERP software into food and beverage plants, several with decades of enterprise relationships and far larger balance sheets. BRAINR's bet is that those systems were built for generic manufacturing and only later adapted for food, while its own platform, containerized and running natively on Amazon Web Services, was built food-first and can plug into a factory's existing SAP or Oracle backbone rather than ripping it out. Gaspar has argued food producers do not want a twelve-month implementation plan; they want one painful problem, like a paper HACCP checklist, solved within a week, with expansion following on trust rather than a sales pitch.
BRAINR's next moves are the United States and Brazil, markets the company has said are already in conversation, alongside expansion already underway in Spain, France, and other European countries, and a planned push beyond meat into bakery, confectionery, and beverage manufacturing. Each of those steps removes the advantage that built the company in the first place: the founder's personal, decade-deep relationship with the customer running the pilot. Gaspar has said the company is no longer trying to prove the technology works. It is trying to prove it can scale to factories it does not already know from the inside, in countries where a Portuguese poultry group's playbook may not translate directly, and against incumbents that will not cede ground quietly. Whether an operating system built for one country's meat industry becomes infrastructure for the world's food supply, or stays a remarkable but geographically contained success story, will be decided by customers BRAINR has never met before.