Skip to main content

Osmo

Category: AI in Healthcare

An AI-powered olfaction company digitizing the sense of smell to discover, design, and reproduce scent molecules for health and consumer applications. Osmo was founded in 2022. The company is led by Alex Wiltschko. Based in Cambridge, USA. Team size: 50-100. Total funding raised: $130.0M. Latest round: Series B. Key investors include ["Lux Capital","Two Sigma Ventures","Google Ventures (GV)","Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation"].

Founded
2022
Headquarters
Cambridge, USA
Team size
50-100
Total funding
$130.0M

Value proposition

Accelerates the discovery of novel, sustainable, and safe scent molecules while enabling the 'teleportation' of scent through digital capture and reproduction, bypassing traditional slow and resource-heavy chemical R&D.

Products and solutions

["Principal Odor Map (POM): A machine learning model that predicts scent profiles from molecular structures.","Scent Teleportation: A hardware and software system for digitizing and reprinting scents.","AI-Designed Fragrance Ingredients: Sustainable, biodegradable, and non-toxic scent molecules.","Scent-Based Diagnostic Tools: R&D for detecting diseases (e.g., malaria, cancer) via olfactory signatures."]

Unique value

Created the first 'map' of smell that allows computers to predict what a molecule smells like based on its structure, effectively establishing an 'RGB for scent.'

Target customer

Fragrance and flavor houses, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, healthcare providers, and agricultural/pest control organizations.

Industries served

["Fragrance & Perfumery","Healthcare & Diagnostics","Consumer Packaged Goods","Agriculture & Pest Control"]

Technology advantage

Proprietary Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) trained on the world's largest dataset of scent molecules; unique 'Scent Teleportation' capability; and a founding team spun out of Google Research with deep expertise in neuroscience and machine learning.

How they differentiate

Osmo differentiates through its 'Principal Odor Map' (POM), a machine learning model that predicts scent from molecular structure. Unlike competitors focused solely on sensing (digital noses), Osmo uses generative AI to design entirely new, sustainable scent molecules and has demonstrated 'scent teleportation'—the ability to digitize, transmit, and physically reprint a scent.

Main competitors

["Aryballe","Aromyx","Koniku"]

Key partnerships

["Google Research (Original spin-out partner)","Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Collaborating on disease detection and pest control)","Lux Capital & Two Sigma Ventures (Lead investors)"]

Notable customers

["Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation","Global Fragrance Houses (Confidential)","Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Partners"]

Major milestones

["Spun out of Google Research with $60M Series A (2023)","Published 'A Principal Odor Map allows predictively mapping molecular structure to odor percepts' in Science (2023)","Successfully demonstrated 'Scent Teleportation' (digitizing and reprinting a scent) (2024)","Raised $70M Series B to scale AI-powered scent technology (2025)"]

Growth metrics

Spun out of Google Research in 2022; scaled from a research team to a 50-100 person commercial entity; published foundational research in the journal 'Science'.

Market positioning

Category leader in AI-driven molecular scent discovery and digital olfaction, bridging the gap between fragrance chemistry and generative AI.

Geographic focus

Global, with primary operations in North America (Cambridge, MA) and strategic partnerships with fragrance houses in Europe.

Patents and IP

Foundational IP based on research published in the journal 'Science' regarding the Principal Odor Map; proprietary hardware designs for scent capture and synthesis.

About Alex Wiltschko

Alex Wiltschko is an olfactory neuroscientist and entrepreneur. Before founding Osmo, he led the Olfaction team at Google Research (Google Brain), where he developed foundational machine learning models for digitizing scent. He was previously a Co-founder of Whetlab, a machine learning startup acquired by Twitter in 2015, where he subsequently served as a Software Engineer. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

Official website: