AI Fragrance Company Osmo Raises $70 Million
Osmo, an AI-powered scent design platform based in New York, announced a new $70 million funding round Wednesday as the company looks to scale its operations.The company will use the funds to expand its team and continue developing the AI models that are the foundation of its business, Osmo’s founder and chief executive Alex Wiltschko told The Business of Beauty.The company, which spun out of an AI research project at Google in late 2022, uses AI to map the relationships between scents, allowing it to anticipate what a fragrance molecule would smell like from its structure, or plot it against other types of data. Wiltschko said Osmo can translate emotions or images into scents, or predict whether a scent is likely to be more successful with Gen Z or in North America.Powering these capabilities is a fleet of AI models that the company calls “olfactory intelligence,” Wiltschko said. “We have already invested heavily from our Series A, and we’re going to continue to invest very, very heavily in this technology stack.”The new round of funding, which was led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from others including Valor, Atreides, Amplo and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, brings Osmo’s total raised to $130 million.As part of its expansion, Osmo also announced new hires in its C-suite, including a new chief commercial officer, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. AI has more generally become a fixture in the fragrance world and is used by large fragrance houses like Givaudan or IFF to help their perfumers formulate novel products. Wiltschko said Osmo’s AI allows fragrance makers to develop new ideas far more quickly than they could in the past. It has helped customers like Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture create a scent in just a few months. Currently, it focuses primarily on creating scents for use in alcohol-based fragrances, which includes fine fragrance but also categories like room spray. Customers tend to be either very large consumer packaged goods players or small, independent brands, according to Wiltschko.Osmo also maintains a small R&D budget for other side projects, such as one that authenticates sneakers by their smell. It’s also looking beyond fragrance creation toward applications for healthcare diagnostics and environmental monitoring, said Colin Beirne, a partner at Two Sigma Ventures and new Osmo board observer, in a release. Learn more:The Same Tech Behind ChatGPT Is Being Used to Produce Novel FragrancesArtificial intelligence is being used to create new ingredients and guide perfumers. But some say the technology doesn’t pass the smell test.Sign up to The Business of Beauty newsletter, your complimentary, must-read source for the day’s most important beauty and wellness news and analysis.
