This up-and-coming startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in nearly half a century

Fragrance technology company Patina says it has raised $2 million in funding from investors, including Betaworks and True Ventures.

The company focuses on creating new scent molecules using advanced molecular design, machine learning, and scent research. Today, most scent molecules used in consumer products are created by a small number of specialized laboratories, which then sell those molecules to perfume houses or cosmetics companies—brands that ultimately turn them into perfumes, candles, or flavored products. Patina is trying to change that, entering an area that has seen little innovation in the past half-century.

The company was founded by Sean Rasbet and Laura Sisson. Raspet is an artist and perfumer who over time developed an obsession with the human senses and began creating new scent and flavor molecules as a creative act. Meanwhile, coming from a background in food and software engineering, Sisson became obsessed with the human senses after discovering an entire scientific field dedicated to modeling them. The two met, of course, at a smell art gallery in New York in 2024, where Rasbet was demonstrating new molecules and Sisson was an engineer building models of olfactory learning.

“We began collaborating on research, and it became clear that the timing was right to build the tools needed to understand smell at a biological level,” Rasbet told TechCrunch. “It felt like a company.”

They launched Patina last year and began working on a foundational model called Sense1, designed to replicate the smell receptors in the nose and create what they describe as “the first universal code for smell and taste.” Currently, researchers largely use words like “floral” or “woody” to describe scents, an imprecise system that leads to discrepancies between regions and languages. Working at the receptor level allows them to create “never-before-seen molecules and reconstruct the world’s rarest natural ingredients,” he said.

Patina said she is already in talks to work with major perfume houses and fashion brands on creating custom scents. The timing seems right. Customers increasingly want “newer, safer, more expressive fragrances,” Sisson said. There is also pressure on the supply chain. Many natural ingredients like rose oil are becoming more difficult and expensive to produce, a problem that synthetic alternatives can help solve. Patina molecules can mimic the scent of rose oil on a biological level, mimicking the natural substance without having to extract it from plants.

“These iterations are less carbon intensive than the original plant extract, and consume much less water and petrochemicals,” Raspet said.

Others in this space include startups like Osmo and legacy companies like Givaudan and Symrise, two of the world’s largest flavor and fragrance giants.

For Patina, there is also an intellectual property angle worth noting. Currently, only fragrance molecules can be patented, not the formulas themselves, meaning scents can be easily replicated. This benefits the big perfume houses, which are the only companies that can really develop enough diverse scents in a laboratory. Artificial intelligence has made this process cheaper and faster, allowing small companies like Patina to create custom scent ingredients in weeks, not years.

“We believe that by expanding the color palette, perfumers and flavorists at all levels will be able to develop and protect their distinctive style,” Raspet said.

AI is also transforming other parts of the perfume industry. It helps to phase out animal testing, Rasbet said, as new models can predict human skin reactions with almost the same accuracy. While understanding how primary odors work at a molecular level seemed out of reach for researchers even five years ago, Patina’s team said AI is helping to achieve breakthroughs in how senses work at a molecular level.

Rasbet said the new funding has already allowed the team to move from their backyard to a convenient office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a small group of chemists, and will move toward launching new molecules and funding new partnerships.

“All models need data to learn from, and we have been able to fund collaborations with startups and academic laboratories to collect receptor activation data. At the same time, we believe that more detailed computational simulations of the interactions of molecules with odorant receptors will be a major opening for expansion,” he added.

The long-term ambition is to create what Rasbet calls the “Pantone of scent” – a reference to the global color-matching system used in the design and manufacturing industries – and create basic scent molecules from which any scent or flavour can be built. “The information has been out there all along, waiting for technology to catch up and a team with the right mix of experience and obsession to unlock it,” Rasbet said. “These ideas can now be turned into reality, with Patina as the core intelligence layer.”