Osmo has raised $163.0M in total across 5 funding rounds.
Osmo's investors include Two Sigma Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Amplo, Atreides Management, Collaborative Fund, Lumina Partners, Patrick Collison, Valor Equity Partners, Dimension Capital, Lux Capital, The Column Group, Accel.
Osmo is a machine learning company pioneering artificial olfaction by digitizing the sense of smell—enabling computers to read, map, and generate scents through advanced software and hardware.[1][2][3][4][6] It serves B2B clients in fragrance, flavor, health, and beyond, solving the manual, slow, and unsustainable process of scent discovery and formulation in a $60B global fragrance market plagued by expensive, toxic, and non-biodegradable compounds.[1][2] Osmo's Generation platform lets brands and influencers submit briefs for faster, cheaper, AI-optimized fragrances, blending molecular prediction, synthesis, and IP licensing for recurring revenue while targeting underserved small-volume creators.[2] With 70 employees by 2025, Series A funding of $68.5M from backers like GV, Lux Capital, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Osmo shows strong growth from R&D to commercial traction, including the world's largest AI-generated fragrance library via private beta.[1][2]
Osmo was founded in 2022 by Alex Wiltschko, a former Google Research scientist, spinning out from 5+ years of incubated work using graph neural networks to predict molecular smells with superhuman accuracy.[1][4][6] The idea emerged from Wiltschko's team at Google, where they achieved breakthroughs like mapping smell structures, creating novel unsmelled molecules, and designing mosquito-repellent scents outperforming DEET in trials.[1][6] Key early backers—Josh Wolfe (Lux), Krishna Yeshwant (GV), and Andy Palmer—enabled the launch with institutional capital.[1] The multidisciplinary founding team includes Christophe Laudamiel (master perfumer), Richard Whitcomb (CTO), and Florence Bagneris (VP Fragrance Sales), blending neuroscience, ML, chemistry, and industry expertise for rapid progress from proof-of-concept to hardware integration for scent capture and reconstruction.[2][4][6] Pivotal early traction came from validating the "digitize scent" thesis, growing from 25 employees by 2023 to 70 by 2025 amid beta customer wins.[2]
Osmo stands out in olfactory AI through these key strengths:
Competitors like Aroma Bit (odor sensors) or Phode (natural aromas) lack Osmo's scalable AI reproduction and generative capabilities.[3]
Osmo rides the AI sensory frontier trend, extending multimodal models (vision, audio) to olfaction amid explosive growth in generative AI for physical-world simulation.[6] Timing is ideal: post-ChatGPT ML advances meet fragrance industry pain points—manual discovery, sustainability mandates, and supply chain toxicity—unlocking a $60B market plus health (disease detection), safety (air quality), and consumer apps.[1][3][4] Favorable forces include falling synthesis costs, regulatory pushes for green chemistry, and investor appetite for "AI + bio" (e.g., GV, Lux backing).[1][2] Osmo influences the ecosystem by democratizing scent creation—empowering influencers and indies, accelerating sustainable innovation, and seeding olfactory datasets for broader AI research, potentially transforming health diagnostics and environmental monitoring.[2][4]
Osmo is poised to dominate digital olfaction, scaling from fragrance GTM (2024 focus on partnerships and molecule launches) to health/wellbeing apps like disease-sniffing diagnostics.[1][2] Next milestones: commercial molecule rollouts, expanded beta traction, and hardware refinements for precision reproduction, fueled by 70-person team's R&D momentum.[2] Shaping trends—AI-biotech convergence, sustainability regs, and sensory AI—could evolve Osmo into an "F&F house 2.0," licensing scents ecosystem-wide while pioneering repellents and therapeutics.[1][6] As computers "generate smells like images today," Osmo redefines sensory tech, turning an elusive human sense into a computable frontier for global impact—proving smell's digitization unlocks healthier, greener lives.[6]
Osmo has raised $163.0M across 5 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $70.0M Series B in February 2026.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 4, 2026 | $70.0M Series B | Two Sigma Ventures | Alumni Ventures, Amplo, Atreides Management, Collaborative Fund, Lumina Partners, Patrick Collison, Valor Equity Partners |
| Jan 1, 2023 | $60.0M Series A | Dimension Capital, Lux Capital, The Column Group | |
| Dec 1, 2016 | $18.0M Series B | Accel, ENIAC Ventures, Equal Ventures, Kamran Ansari, K9 Ventures, Owl Rock Capital Partners, Plug & Play Ventures, Reach Capital, Shasta Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Ethan Beard, Gokul Rajaram, Rob Glaser, Tien Tzuo | |
| Oct 1, 2014 | $12.0M Series A | Accel, ENIAC Ventures, Equal Ventures, Kamran Ansari, K9 Ventures, Owl Rock Capital Partners, Plug & Play Ventures, Reach Capital, Shasta Ventures, Upfront Ventures, Ethan Beard, Gokul Rajaram, Rob Glaser, Tien Tzuo | |
| Sep 1, 2013 | $3.0M Seed | Kamran Ansari, K9 Ventures, Reach Capital, Upfront Ventures, Ethan Beard |
