Digitizing smell will give everyone a chance at a better life.
In this new era, computers will capture and understand the chemical world to help us enjoy new smells and tastes, recall memories, forecast opportunities and danger, and make life-saving decisions. Computers will generate smells like we generate images and sounds today.
To fulfill this vision, Osmo is bringing together an accomplished, multidisciplinary team to build on its world-class research and activate its unprecedented combination of hardware, software, data and capital.
Team
Led by entrepreneur and neuroscientist Alex Wiltschko, the Osmo team has skills and expertise spanning machine learning, olfactory neuroscience, data science, MLOps, DataOps, psychophysics, sensor development, electrical engineering, mechatronics, fine fragrance, analytical chemistry and product development.
History
At Google Research, Alex’s digital olfaction team used cutting-edge machine learning to build the foundations of Osmo’s map of smell, including:
Using Graph Neural Networks to achieve a major breakthrough in predicting the smell of a molecule from its structure
Creating new molecules no one had ever smelled before and predicting them with superhuman accuracy
Designing molecules that smell bad to mosquitoes (e.g. insect repellents) and are more potent than DEET in human trials
With the team’s work at Google Research validated over years, the best path for realizing the mission of digitizing smell would be through a separate startup, Osmo, dedicated to tackling the unique challenges to come.
Funding
Osmo was founded with the core support of Lux Capital and Google Ventures. Our world-class investors and funding institutions include: Arena Holdings, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Moore Strategic Ventures, Exor Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and the Amazon Alexa Fund; individual investors include Hugo Barra, Soumith Chintala, Jeff Dean, Henry R. Kravis, Rich Miner, and Thomas Reardon.
