Fragrance tech company Patina says it has raised $2 million in funding 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 of the scent molecules used in consumer products are created by a small number of specialized labs, which then sell those molecules to fragrance houses or cosmetics companies — the brands that ultimately turn them into perfumes, candles, or flavored products. Patina is trying to shake that up, entering an area that has seen little innovation in the past 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 human senses and began creating new scent and flavor molecules 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, naturally, at a scent art 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 timing was right to finally build the tools to understand scent at the biological level,” Raspet told TechCrunch. “That felt like a company.”
They launched Patina last year and began working on a foundational model called Sense1, designed to replicate the scent receptors in the nose and create what they describe as “the first universal code of smell and taste.” Currently, researchers largely use words like “floral” or “woody” to describe smells, an imprecise system that leads to inconsistencies across regions and languages. Working on the receptor level, he said, allo …