I have no affiliation with SCiO other than I went to one of their meetups. But to counter your points: - All spectroscopy is surface reading, with NIR penetr

I have no affiliation with SCiO other than I went to one of their meetups. But to counter your points: - All spectroscopy is surface reading, with NIR penetrating somewhat deeper. But it's still up to you to prepare the sample. - IIRC, there were 400 datapoints corresponding to 1 nm spaced wavelengths from 700-1100 nm. The models aren't super smart, correct, and need a lot of collective data to be useful. They were able to do more than you describe though (a demo they did was scan cheese for protein/fat composition, though to be fair those are trained models, probably with external data). - It's up to you (and the other data providers) to prepare the sample correctly and test it the same way. - Yeah, I don't know what they are thinking on this. Don't get me wrong - I didn't find SCiO particularly useful and am not sure where it's going. But I wouldn't be surprised to see technological improvement either. That is, if they have a business model and further funding.