Osmo, the New York-based AI-powered scent design platform, announced a new $70 million funding round on Wednesday as it looks to expand its business.
Osmo founder and CEO Alex Wiltschko said the company will use the funding to expand its team and continue developing the AI models that underpin its business. beauty business.
The company, which was spun out of Google’s AI research project in late 2022, uses AI to map relationships between scents, allowing it to predict what a scent molecule will smell like based on its structure and plot it against other types of data. Wilchko said Osmo can translate emotions and images into scents and predict whether a scent is likely to be more successful with Gen Z and North America.
Powering these capabilities is a suite of AI models the company calls “olfactory intelligence,” Wiltschko said. “We have already made significant investments from our Series A and will continue to invest very heavily in this technology stack.”
The new funding round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with participation from Valor, Atreides, Amplo, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and others, bringing Osmo’s total funding to $130 million.
As part of its expansion, Osmo also announced new executive hires, including a new chief commercial officer, chief operating officer and chief financial officer.
AI is commonplace in the fragrance world and is used by major fragrance houses such as Givaudan and IFF to assist perfumers in formulating new products. Wiltschko said Osmo’s AI allows fragrance makers to develop new ideas much more quickly than before. This allows customers like Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture to create scents in just a few months.
Our current focus is on creating scents that are primarily used in alcohol-based fragrances, which includes fine fragrances as well as categories such as room sprays. Wilchko said customers tend to be either very large consumer goods companies or smaller independent brands.
Osmo also maintains a small R&D budget for other side projects, such as a project to authenticate sneakers by smell. Colin Beirne, partner at Two Sigma Ventures and new Osmo board observer, said in a release that the company is looking beyond fragrance development to include applications in medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.
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