Fragrance technology company Patina says she has raised $2 million in funding from investors including Betaworks and True Ventures.
The company focuses on creating new fragrance molecules using advanced molecular design, machine learning and fragrance research. Today, most of the fragrance 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—the brands that ultimately turn them into perfumes, candles, or scented products. Patina is trying to shake that up, entering an area that has seen little innovation in the last 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 molecules of fragrance and flavor as a creative pursuit. Sisson, meanwhile, came from a background in food and software engineering and became obsessed with human senses after discovering an entire scientific field dedicated to modeling them. The two met, of course, at a fragrance gallery in New York in 2024, where Raspet was exhibiting new molecules and Sisson was an engineer building olfactory learning models.
“We started collaborating on research and it became clear that the time was right to finally build the tools to understand smell at a biological level,” Raspet told TechCrunch. “Seemed like company.”
They launched Patina last year and began working on a fundamental model called Sense1, designed to replicate the aroma receptors in the nose and create what they describe as “the world’s first code of smell and taste”. Currently, researchers largely use words like “floral” or “woody” to describe scents, an imprecise system that leads to inconsistencies between regions and languages. Working at the receptor level, he said, allows them to create “molecules that have never been smelled before and reconstruct the world’s rarest natural ingredients.”
Patina said she is already in talks to collaborate with top perfume houses and fashion brands to create custom fragrances. The timing seems right. Customers increasingly want “newer, safer and more expressive fragrances,” Sisson said. There is also pressure on the supply chain. Many natural ingredients like rose oil are becoming harder to produce and more expensive — a problem that synthetic alternatives could help solve. Patina molecules can simulate the smell of rose oil on a biological level, mimicking the natural material without the need for plant extraction.
“These iterations are less carbon intensive than the original plant extract, consuming significantly less water and petrochemicals,” said Raspet.
Others in this space include startups like Osmo and legacy incumbents like Givaudan and Symrise, two of the world’s biggest flavor and fragrance giants.
For Patina, there is also an intellectual property angle worth noting. Currently, only the molecules of perfumes can be patented, not the formulas themselves, meaning that perfumes can easily be replicated. This benefits the big perfume houses, the only players who could actually afford to develop several perfume variants in a laboratory. Artificial intelligence has made this process cheaper and faster, allowing smaller companies like Patina to create custom fragrances in weeks rather than years.
“We believe that by expanding the palette, perfumers and perfumers of all scales will be able to develop and protect their signature style,” said Raspet.
AI is also transforming other parts of the fragrance industry. It helps phase out animal testing because the new models can predict human skin reactions with almost the same accuracy, Raspet said. And while understanding how primary smells work at the molecular level seemed far-fetched to researchers even five years ago, Patina’s team said AI is helping to unlock discoveries in how the senses work at the molecular level.
Raspet said the new funding has already allowed the team to move from his backyard to a convenient office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a small team of chemists, and will move on to launching new molecules and funding new collaborations.
“All models need data to learn, and we were able to fund collaborations with startups and academic labs to collect this receptor activation data. At the same time, we believe that more detailed computational simulation of molecules’ interactions with odorant receptors will be a huge unlock for scaling,” he added.
The long-term ambition is to create what Raspet calls a “Pantone for fragrance” – a reference to the global color-matching system used across the design and manufacturing industries – establishing the primary scent molecules from which any smell or taste can be created. “The information has been there all along, 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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