This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in almost half a century

Source: TechCrunch

Funding

Fragrance‑tech company Patina announced a $2 million funding round with investors that include Betaworks and True Ventures.

Founders and Vision

Patina was founded by Sean Raspet and Laura Sisson.

• Sean Raspet – artist and perfumer who developed an obsession with human senses and began creating new scent and flavor molecules as a creative pursuit.
• Laura Sisson – background in food and software engineering; became fascinated by the scientific field dedicated to modeling human senses.

The two met at a scent‑art gallery in New York in 2024, where Raspet was exhibiting new molecules and Sisson was building olfactory learning models. Their collaboration quickly evolved into a company focused on building tools to understand scent at the biological level.

Technology

Patina is developing a foundational model called Sense1, designed to replicate the scent receptors in the nose and create what the team describes as “the first universal code of smell and taste.”

Key aspects of the approach

• Moves beyond traditional, imprecise descriptors such as “floral” or “woody.”
• Works at the receptor level to generate “never‑before‑smelled” molecules and to reconstruct rare natural ingredients.
• Enables the creation of synthetic alternatives that mimic natural scents (e.g., rose oil) while reducing water and petrochemical usage.

Market and Partnerships

Patina is already in talks with top fragrance houses and fashion brands to develop custom scents. The timing aligns with several market trends:

• Consumers are seeking “newer, safer and more expressive” perfumes.
• Supply‑chain pressures are making natural ingredients like rose oil harder and more expensive to produce.
• Synthetic replicas can be less carbon‑intensive and more sustainable.

Industry Context

Other players in the space include startups such as Osmo and legacy giants Givaudan and Symrise, two of the world’s largest flavor and fragrance companies.

Patina’s business model also addresses an intellectual‑property gap: currently only individual fragrance molecules can be patented, not the formulas themselves. By leveraging AI to accelerate molecule design, Patina can create custom scent ingredients in weeks rather than years, allowing smaller companies to develop and protect distinctive scents.

AI is further transforming the industry by:

• Reducing the need for animal testing through predictive models of human‑skin reactions.
• Unlocking molecular‑level insights into how primary scents function, a capability that seemed far‑fetched just five years ago.

Recent Developments

The new funding has enabled Patina to move from a backyard lab to a dedicated office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where a small team of chemists is working on launching new molecules and forming partnerships. The capital also supports collaborations with startups and academic labs to gather receptor‑activation data, which is essential for training and refining their models.

Long‑Term Ambition

Patina aims to create a “Pantone for scent,” a universal reference system for primary scent molecules that can be combined to build any smell or flavor. Raspet describes this as unlocking information that has existed all along, now made accessible by advanced technology and interdisciplinary expertise.