The thing about smell is that nobody took it seriously until it started costing real money. Sight got screens. Sound got streaming. Touch got haptics. Smell stayed tribal, mystical, locked in labs...
The thing about smell is that nobody took it seriously until it started costing real money. Sight got screens. Sound got streaming. Touch got haptics. Smell stayed tribal, mystical, locked in labs and noses and intuition. Then Alex Wiltschko showed up with a Ph.D., a memory of Google Brain, and the audacity to say this sense is data too. Not vibes. Not magic. Data. That is how Osmo was born in 2022, spun out of Google Brain, officially stepping into daylight in January 2023, and quietly asking an entire industry why it was still guessing.
Fast forward to now and Osmo just pulled in $70M in Series B funding, bringing total capital raised to $130M. Two Sigma Ventures led the round, which tells you exactly how serious this moment is. This is not perfume money. This is pattern recognition money. Valor, Atreides, Amplo, Alumni Ventures, Collab Fund, Lumina Partners, and Patrick Collison joined in, with Lux Capital and GV continuing their support. When quantitative investors start betting on scent, it means the math is finally loud enough to smell.
Osmo is a digital scent design company, but that description barely scratches the surface. Their Olfactory Intelligence platform uses machine learning to predict what molecules smell like from molecular structure. That sentence alone would have sounded insane 10 years ago. In 2024 they achieved scent teleportation, the first full digitization of scent without human intervention. That is not a parlor trick. That is infrastructure. That is the difference between art locked in a room and intelligence that scales.
This does not work without adults in the room. Alex Wiltschko as Founder and CEO anchors the vision. Rich Whitcomb as CTO keeps the models honest. Mike Rytokoski brings decades of commercial scar tissue as CCO. Nate Pearson runs the financial discipline as CFO. Mateusz Brzuchacz keeps operations grounded in reality as COO. Then you layer in Christophe Laudamiel, Zerlina Dubois, and Thomas Fachon, because data without taste is just noise. The board lineup with Josh Wolfe, Andy Palmer, and Boet Brinkgreve adds gravity, with Colin Beirne observing from Two Sigma Ventures, which feels appropriate.
The business lesson here is simple and brutal. Osmo did not raise because scent is sexy. Osmo raised because they built proprietary data, proved it worked, and aimed it at massive markets like fragrance, healthcare, and public safety. They turned smell into software, then into manufacturing, then into margin. Emerging brands get access. Enterprises get speed and cost reduction. Everyone gets fewer guesses.