Convincing people that smell matters has been a lifetime project for Alex Wiltschko, who discovered a love for all things fragrance at the age of 12. The neuroscientist spent years in Google Brain’s digital olfaction group, developing fragrance technology in a field that has traditionally favored our audiovisual senses over our sense of smell. Now with the fragrance industry only continuing to grow, the rest of the world is catching up to the opportunity in all things olfactive.
In 2023, Wiltschko founded digital fragrance research company Osmo with $60 million in Series A funding led by Google Ventures and Lux Capital. Osmo’s research includes digitizing scent and predicting the smell of odor molecules. To make its findings available to a wider market, Osmo has now launched Generation, a fragrance design house powered by artificial intelligence.
“Because we use a lot of automation, we’ve lowered the barriers [to launching a brand]. And so if you come to us and you say, ‘I want to launch a brand, and I don’t want to start with 20,000 bottles — I want to start with 1,000 or even less,’ we can do that,” Wiltschko said of Generation, which was launched in March.
“What we see today is 60,000 brands being serviced by 50 companies that make scent. And instead of there being 60,000 in the future, I think there’s going to be 600,000 and then 6 million,” he said.
Many of the fragrances on the market today are made by just a handful of fragrance developers, such as Swiss companies Givuadan and Dsm–Firmenich and New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc. Wiltschko believes Generation can fill a gap in the market to serve independent brands and founders who can’t meet the volume necessary to work with those large companies.
“We’re laser-focused on underserved and unserved clients in the market of scent design. These are smaller brands — $100 million in revenue and less, sometimes much less,” said Wiltschko. He said Generation will be able to develop not just scents, but also brands from the ground up.
To compete with those fragrance giants, Osmo’s Generation will use a form of artificial intelligence, which Wiltschko calls olfactory intelligence. Generation-made fragrances will draw upon a library of 900 ingredients, including synthetic and natural ingredients and five proprietary fragrance molecules known in the industry as captives. Wiltschko said Generation will still be powered by human creativity, but its OI capabilities will allow it to quickly develop new fragrances that meet a wide range of criteria, such as compliance with regulations set forth by IFRA, the global representative body of the fragrance industry.
“We use OI to enhance particular scent attributes, or to make a fragrance more ecologically friendly,” he said. “Our customers ask us for all different kinds of things, and fundamentally, the answer is always a human creator augmented by OI to solve actual scent design problems in the world very quickly.”
Those larger fragrance developers have invested in their own AI capabilities in recent years. Givaudan acquired French AI company Myrissi in 2021, while IFF launched AI-driven chat platform ScentChat in February.
As in many creative industries, some perfumers have been skeptical of the use of AI to replace human labor. Osmo’s team includes master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, founder of the Perfumery Code of Ethics, who has advocated for transparency in perfumery and protecting the work of the perfumer.
“We have to be sensitive about AI because it’s been vulgarized,” said Florence Bagneris, who joined as Osmo’s vp of fragrance sales in February after leading sales for Dsm-Firmenich’s prestige fragrances. “A lot of companies — marketers — use AI for everything. What’s different here is that AI is a tool that is combined with chemistry to [create] perfumery.”
Bagneris said that working with AI will allow Generation to offer even small brands and producers custom-built scents, whereas many larger fragrance developers may offer fragrance formulas from their existing libraries to lower-volume clients. That customization is key, she said, when many consumers and retailers are craving something new all the time.
“[Generation] is coming at the right time, where you see a proliferation of new brands,” she said. “You also have retailers like Sephora, which have an appetite for new brands. So novelty is favored.”
Generation’s first perfume to the market will be a limited-edition fragrance made in collaboration with Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, set to launch in June. Wiltschko believes there is opportunity to work with a range of entities, such as independent perfumers, hospitality companies looking to develop custom ambient scents or content creators, an increasing number of which are monetizing their image through perfume launches.
“We are very much speeding to where we believe the puck will be, which is a proliferation of brands, where the growth is happening with the smallest brands that are the most personalized, the most targeted and the most authentic, frankly,” he said. “And we want to be the scent design partner for all of them.”
