There's a little tear down of how the SCiO works, which might be of interest - https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/scio-pocket-molecular-s...

It seems quite simple, in that it seems to use a light source and looks at the reflection using photodiodes with different lenses on top.

So as I understand it wouldn't perform as well as a spectrometer with diffraction grating and linear CCD, but would be interested to hear from someone knowledgeable about spectrometers about that.

But it does seem to use a simpler principle than a raman spectrometer, I believe this is the general term for the approach it uses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-infrared_spectroscopy