Osmo, a Cambridge, MA-based machine olfaction startup, received a $3.5m grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The grant is in addition to a $5m equity investment in Osmo that the foundation made at the company’s January 2023 launch.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its AI-enabled scent platform for discovering and producing compounds that repel, attract, or destroy disease-carrying insects to improve animal and human health.
Led by CEO Alex Wiltschko, Osmo combines machine learning, data science, psychophysics, olfactory neuroscience, electrical engineering, and chemistry in a multi-disciplinary approach to digitizing scent. Its work is grounded in machine olfaction research that the team validated at Google Research, including a 2019 study that used Graph Neural Networks to predict the smell of a molecule from its structure. The company has begun work in the flavor and fragrance market to create a new generation of aroma molecules. Over time, Osmo expects to work in domains such as public health and agriculture on solutions that help humans detect diseases earlier, track pandemics faster, grow more food, catch food spoilage, and ward off insects.
FinSMEs
08/11/2023