Term Sheet Next: How Alex Wiltschko went from Google Brain to giving computers the sense of smell
Alex Wiltschko started collecting fragrances when he was 12. He would go to T.J. Maxx every few weeks to search for discounted perfumes, waiting until they were marked down enough that he could afford them. He ended up pursuing a doctorate in olfactory neuroscience. “I went to the edge of what we know as a species about how smell works,” he said. “It turns out it’s not that much.”
Wiltschko was also a computer nerd—a combination, he jokes, that didn’t make him super popular in high school, but it worked out for him in the end. Today, Wiltschko is the founder and CEO of Osmo, a company that uses artificial intelligence to digitize the sense of smell—or, to put it another way, that gives computers the sense of smell. The company, which works with anyone from Instagram influencers to laundry brands to StockX, spun out of Alphabet’s Google and has raised more than $60 million in funding, including from Lux Capital and GV.
As AI eats the world, it’s rare for a breakthrough company to have such a tangible, physical use case. That stems largely from Wiltschko himself, who may be the only person in the world suited to found a company such as Osmo. “I live at this very thin intersection of AI and olfaction,” he told me when I visited Osmo’s New York headquarters in March. I asked him how many people fit that profile. “One,” he responded, laughing.
After finishing his PhD, Wiltschko started and sold two AI companies, one to a biotech firm and one to Twitter, where he started the deep learning group. He then left for Google Brain, where he created Alphabet’s olfaction group. “Google knows what the world looks like and what it sounds like,” he said. “We had this thesis that if we could figure out what the world smells and tastes like, the product surface would be really, really interesting.”
After five years of working on the project, Wiltschko realized that the best way to scale would be to build a separate company, which he was able to do with the blessing of Google. He founded Osmo in 2022, which now has around 70 employees and operates what looks more like a lab than a software company. “This is where we do all of our mad scientist, Breaking Bad stuff,” Wiltschko joked as he led me through a tour, gesturing at a sprawling workspace cluttered with beakers, vials, and myriad gadgets.
To accomplish its mission, Osmo is using AI to discover new forms of matter by filtering through billions of possible molecules to predict what they’ll smell like, if they’ll be safe, and if they’ll be affordable—and then creating them in its lab. The startup does so with a proprietary AI system—which it calls Olfactory Intelligence, or OI—that it built from the ground up, drawn from a massive training set. “We’re able to take and organize all the world's information and actually make it useful in terms of interpreting it as olfaction,” Wiltschko said. Interpreting a spring day as fragrance notes, for example, might involve both understanding existing market product formulas, as well as downloading the entire internet to dissect abstract expressions into chemical formulas.
Osmo’s CTO used to be the data architect for Nvidia’s autonomous vehicles program. The company also employs one of the world’s 30-odd master perfumers, Christophe Laudamiel, who has created scents for Abercrombie & Fitch, Beyoncé, and Tom Ford.
The company is still working out its business model. For now, Osmo is mostly B2B, such as helping influencers launch a perfume line or existing fragrance brands reduce costs or expand offerings, as well as working with other types of scent-centered businesses like cleaning care companies. A second product line is creating “electronic noses.” Osmo deployed the concept for the shoe marketplace StockX to help it detect counterfeits, and could be expanded in any number of use cases, like assessing air safety or monitoring blood sugar levels.
Another possibility would be to eventually expand to a consumer model, and potentially launch its own products, or a way for people to design their own scents. “As our capabilities mature, there are a lot of options to bring this to more people and to hopefully democratize perfumery over time,” Wiltschko said.
For a man who has dedicated his life to olfaction, Wiltschko had a ready answer when I asked him about his favorite smells. For fragrances, he pointed to Jean-Claude Ellena, the former in-house perfumer at Hermès. “But my favorite scent is honestly the skin of my loved ones, so my wife's neck when the sunlight is hitting it, and then the top of my baby's head,” he said.
Some things are better left to nature.
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com