Fragrance technology company Patina says it has raised $2 million from investors including Betaworks and True Ventures.
The company focuses on creating new odorous molecules using advanced molecular design, machine learning and olfactory research. Today, most odor molecules used in consumer products are created by a small number of specialized laboratories, which then sell these molecules to perfume houses or cosmetics companies – brands which ultimately transform them into perfumes, candles or flavored products. Patina is trying to shake up that situation by entering a field that has seen little innovation over the past half-century.
The company was founded by Sean Raspet and Laura Sisson. Raspet is an artist and perfumer who, over time, developed an obsession with the human senses and began creating new perfume and flavor molecules as a creative quest. Sisson, meanwhile, came from a background in food engineering and software engineering and became obsessed with human senses after discovering an entire scientific field dedicated to modeling them. The two met, naturally, at an olfactory art gallery in New York in 2024, where Raspet was exhibiting new molecules and Sisson was an engineer building models of olfactory learning.
“We started collaborating on research and it became clear that the time was right to finally create the tools to understand odors at a biological level,” Raspet told TechCrunch. “It looked like a business.”
They launched Patina last year and began work on a basic model called Sense1, designed to replicate the olfactory receptors in the nose and create what they describe as “the first universal code for smell and taste.” Currently, researchers widely use words like “floral” or “woody” to describe odors, an imprecise system that leads to inconsistencies across regions and languages. Working at the receptor level, he said, allows them to create “molecules never felt before and reconstruct the world’s rarest natural ingredients.”
Patina said she is already in talks to work with top perfume houses and with fashion brands on creating custom fragrances. The timing seems right. Customers increasingly want “newer, safer, more expressive scents,” Sisson said. There is also supply chain pressure. Many natural ingredients like rose oil are increasingly difficult to produce and more expensive – a problem that synthetic alternatives could help solve. Patina’s molecules can simulate the scent of rose oil on a biological level, mimicking the natural material without requiring plant extraction.
“These replications are less carbon intensive than the original plant extract, consuming significantly less water and petrochemicals,” Raspet said.
Other players in this space include startups like Osmo and incumbents like Givaudan and Symrise, two of the largest flavor and fragrance giants in the world.
For Patina, it is also worth noting an aspect of intellectual property. Currently, only fragrance molecules can be patented, not the formulas themselves, meaning scents can easily be replicated. This benefits the big perfume houses, the only ones that can really afford to develop enough olfactory variations in the laboratory. AI has made this process cheaper and faster, allowing small businesses like Patina to create custom fragrance ingredients in weeks, not years.
“We believe that by expanding the palette, perfumers and spicers at all levels will be able to develop and protect their style,” Raspet said.
AI is also transforming other parts of the perfume industry. This helps phase out animal testing, since new models can predict human skin reactions almost as accurately, Raspet said. And although understanding how primary odors work at the molecular level seemed far-fetched to researchers just five years ago, the Patina team said AI was helping to achieve breakthroughs in how senses work at the molecular level.
Raspet said the new funding has already allowed the team to move out of their backyard and into a real office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a small group of chemists and will be used to launch new molecules and fund new partnerships.
“All models need data to learn, and we have been able to fund collaborations with startups and academic labs to collect this receptor activation data. At the same time, we believe that more detailed simulation of the interactions of molecules with odor receptors will provide a huge opportunity for scale-up,” he added.
The long-term ambition is to create what Raspet calls a “Pantone for fragrance” – a reference to the universal color matching system used in the design and manufacturing industries – establishing the main odor molecules from which any smell or flavor can be created. “The information has always been there, waiting for technology to catch up and a team with the right combination of expertise and obsession to unlock it,” Raspet said. “These ideas can now become reality, with Patina as the underlying intelligence layer. »
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