Blog & Press

Osmo’s mission is to digitize our sense of smell to improve human health and happiness. We stand for truth and beauty. We exist to bring more of each into the world.

‍

We’re doing that—now, and for many years to come—by teaching computers how to smell. We call it Olfactory Intelligence. OI will help us understand the chemical spectrum of scent as well as scientists understand the spectrums of light and sound.

‍

We come to this work with deep curiosity. 

‍

Scent is the product of biology; each molecule, a letter in the language of life that we are slowly learning to speak. Our bodies and other species are telling us a story. We want to understand what that story means.

‍

Moreover, we want to give people the power to tell their own stories through fragrance. Scent is an invisible world of emotion and memory. OI should not only make that world visible, but richer, more diverse, and accessible to everyone.

‍

I believe that if Osmo works at these intersections—between art and science, curiosity and application, truth and beauty—we can save and improve countless lives over the next century.

‍

We started climbing up this mountain about two and a half years ago. And now, I’m proud to say that we’ve reached our first stop.

‍

Creating beauty

‍

In March 2025, Osmo launched a fragrance house called Generation.

‍

Generation is a fragrance design and manufacturing company powered by OI. The technology we’ve built can reproduce natural scents—like a fresh-cut summer plum—with extraordinary fidelity. It can also predict entirely new molecules that smell gorgeous. 

‍

We created Generation to put OI into people’s hands, so they can express their creativity and make the world a more beautiful place.

‍

Demand is strong, because people understand the deep and intrinsic value of scent. A friend’s candle, a boyfriend’s shampoo, a grandmother’s sweater—each diffuses a molecular memory of who and what we love. Scent design is about making more of those memories for ourselves and other people.

‍

Until now, almost no one has had the opportunity.

‍

This is because fragrance houses today resemble the fragrance houses of the 19th century. The industry was never digitized or automated, which means that the process of designing a new scent is both baroque and burdensome. The wait times are years long. The minimum orders are enormous. The expense is astronomical. And as a result, the market is much smaller than it could be.

‍

A handful of luxury hotels can afford to create a signature scent, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.

‍

Generation, then, is an opportunity to grow the market.

‍

For every perfumer working today, we imagine a thousand more. Today, they’re running bed and breakfasts and boutiques. They’re managing offices and manufacturing clothes. They’re in high school, dreaming.

‍

Tomorrow, they’re using OI to infuse the world with scent memories that run like a soundtrack—invisible, dynamic, personal, everywhere. Fragrance design for all.

‍

Revealing truth

‍

That’s a more beautiful world. And what we learn about beauty, we can use to discover truth.

‍

There’s no greater perfumer than the flower. It’s the entirety of fragrance design and manufacturing contained within a self-replicating package. Everything fragrance houses do is imitation.

‍

Of course, imitation is a great way to learn—and one of the most important lessons flowers have taught us is that the chemical palette of scent is shared across all kingdoms of life. The molecules a flower uses to talk to bees are the very same molecules you smell from soup on the stove, a hug from your mom, or the breath of someone on a hospital bed. Scent is the product of ancient biological technology; we’re all smelling a single chemical spectrum. 

‍

Or, to put an even finer point on it: molecules are the language of life, and scent is how we listen.

‍

That simple insight leads to surprising applications. We can train an OI model on what smells good and bad to human beings, for instance, then use it to predict a molecule that smells terrible to mosquitos. This is fragrance design with the lifesaving power of a bednet.

‍

We can also train OI to smell disease—from cancers and diabetes to tuberculosis and Parkinson’s. Dogs have proven that it’s possible. If we recreate their capabilities in software, we could build tools that detect disease before doctors can, and that scale infinitely.

‍

Then, what if we go a step further, making those tools universally accessible?

‍

In that world, we could use scent to monitor health at a population level. Epidemiologists could smell an uptick in leukemia downstream of a new oil refinery, or pinpoint a viral outbreak before it becomes a pandemic.

‍

That information is infinitely valuable. With OI, we could finally bring the hidden truths of health and disease to light.

‍

An endless braid

‍

One of the wonderful things about learning is that it deepens your sense of reverence. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to develop the cells in a dog’s nose or a flower’s petal, and it’s audacious to think we can replicate them within the span of a lifetime.

‍

Yet Osmo’s mission is to go beyond. A flower produces exactly one fragrance from first sprout to the final petal falling, and dogs can be trained to detect just a handful of scents. These are individual words, when we need to speak the entire language.

‍

Ultimately, we need to squeeze that capability into the palm of your hand. Imagine a device that can read and write scent as smoothly as you can scroll on your phone.

‍

That future is far off—clearly. But the arc of history shows us that we can get there. 

‍

After all, an eagle might be able to see a ground squirrel from two miles away, but human beings are the only species that has developed the capacity to see Andromeda. With telescopes, we’ve peered through time to the near-birth of the universe.

‍

I believe scent will bring its own revelations. We’ll discover them by searching for truth and beauty together. Like strands of a braid, each twist will give way to the next. 

‍

The first twist was the invention of OI. The second was Generation. I look forward to the third, the tenth, the hundredth—each one a turn down an endless path of discovery.

‍