This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in almost half a century
This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in almost half a century
这家年轻的初创公司正在挑战近半个世纪未曾改变的香水行业
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. 香水科技公司 Patina 宣布已筹集 200 万美元资金，投资方包括 Betaworks 和 True Ventures。该公司专注于利用先进的分子设计、机器学习和气味研究来创造新的气味分子。
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. 如今，消费品中使用的大多数气味分子都是由少数几家专业实验室创造的，然后这些实验室将分子出售给香精香料公司或化妆品公司——即最终将其制成香水、蜡烛或调味产品的品牌。Patina 正试图打破这一格局，进入一个在过去半个世纪里几乎没有创新的领域。
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. 该公司由 Sean Raspet 和 Laura Sisson 共同创立。Raspet 是一位艺术家兼调香师，随着时间的推移，他对人类感官产生了浓厚兴趣，并开始将创造新的气味和风味分子作为一种创作追求。与此同时，Sisson 拥有食品和软件工程背景，在发现了一个专门用于模拟人类感官的科学领域后，她也对这一领域产生了痴迷。
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.” 两人于 2024 年在纽约的一家气味艺术画廊相遇，当时 Raspet 正在展出新的分子，而 Sisson 则是一名正在构建嗅觉学习模型的工程师。“我们开始合作研究，很明显，现在是时候构建能够从生物学层面理解气味的工具了，”Raspet 告诉 TechCrunch。“这感觉就像是一家公司。”
They launched Patina last year and began working on a foundation 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.” 他们于去年创办了 Patina，并开始开发名为 Sense1 的基础模型，旨在复制鼻腔中的气味受体，并创造出他们所描述的“第一个气味和味道的通用代码”。
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, allows them to create “never-before-smelled molecules and reconstruct the world’s rarest natural ingredients.” 目前，研究人员主要使用“花香”或“木质”等词汇来描述气味，这种不精确的系统导致了不同地区和语言之间的不一致。他表示，在受体层面进行研究，使他们能够创造出“前所未有的气味分子，并重构世界上最稀有的天然成分”。
Patina said it is already in talks to work with top fragrance houses and with fashion brands about creating custom scents. The timing feels right. Customers increasingly want “newer, safer and more expressive perfumes,” Sisson said. There’s also supply-chain pressure. Many natural ingredients like rose oil are becoming harder to produce and more expensive — a problem that synthetic alternatives could help solve. Patina 表示，目前正在与顶级香精香料公司及时尚品牌洽谈定制香水事宜。时机恰到好处。Sisson 表示，消费者越来越渴望“更新颖、更安全、更具表现力的香水”。此外，供应链也存在压力。许多天然成分（如玫瑰油）的生产变得越来越困难且昂贵，而合成替代品可以帮助解决这一问题。
Patina’s molecules can simulate the smell of rose oil at the biological level, mimicking the natural material without the need for plant extraction. “These replications are less carbon-intensive than the original plant extract, consuming significantly less water and petrochemicals,” Raspet said. Patina 的分子可以在生物学层面模拟玫瑰油的气味，无需植物提取即可模仿天然材料。Raspet 说：“这些复制品比原始植物提取物的碳强度更低，消耗的水和石油化工产品也显著减少。”
Others in this space include startups like Osmo and legacy incumbents like Givaudan and Symrise, two of the largest flavor and fragrance giants in the world. For Patina, there is also an intellectual property angle worth noting. Right now, only fragrance molecules can be patented, not the formulas themselves, meaning that scents can easily be replicated. This benefits the large fragrance houses, the only players that could really afford to develop enough scent variations in a lab. 该领域的其他参与者包括像 Osmo 这样的初创公司，以及像奇华顿 (Givaudan) 和德之馨 (Symrise) 这样的老牌巨头，它们是全球最大的香精香料公司。对于 Patina 来说，还有一个值得注意的知识产权角度。目前，只有香气分子可以申请专利，而配方本身不能，这意味着气味很容易被复制。这对大型香精香料公司有利，因为它们是唯一有能力在实验室中开发出足够多气味变体的参与者。
AI has made this process cheaper and faster, letting smaller companies like Patina create custom scent ingredients in weeks, not years. “We think by expanding the palette, perfumers and flavorists at all scales will be able to develop and protect their signature style,” Raspet said. 人工智能使这一过程变得更便宜、更快捷，让像 Patina 这样的小型公司能够在几周而非几年内创造出定制的香气成分。Raspet 说：“我们认为，通过扩大调色板，各种规模的调香师和调味师都将能够开发并保护他们独特的风格。”
AI is also transforming other parts of the scent industry. It’s helping to phase out animal testing, since new models can predict human-skin reactions nearly as accurately, Raspet said. And while understanding how primary scents work at a molecular level seemed far-fetched to researchers even five years ago, the Patina team said AI is helping unlock breakthroughs in how the senses function at a molecular level. 人工智能也在改变香水行业的其他部分。Raspet 表示，它正在帮助淘汰动物实验，因为新模型预测人类皮肤反应的准确度几乎相当。虽然在五年前，从分子层面理解基本气味的工作原理对研究人员来说似乎还遥不可及，但 Patina 团队表示，人工智能正在帮助实现感官在分子层面运作方式的突破。
Raspet said the new funding has already allowed the team to move from his backyard into a proper office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a small group of chemists and will go toward launching new molecules and funding new partnerships. “All models need data to learn from, and we’ve been able to fund collaborations with startups and academic labs to gather this receptor activation data. At the same time, we believe more computationally detailed simulation of interactions of molecules with odor receptors will be a huge unlock for scaling,” he added. Raspet 表示，这笔新资金已经让团队从他的后院搬到了布鲁克林布什威克 (Bushwick) 的正式办公室，并雇佣了一小群化学家，资金将用于推出新分子和资助新的合作伙伴关系。“所有模型都需要数据来学习，我们已经能够资助与初创公司和学术实验室的合作，以收集这些受体激活数据。同时，我们相信，对分子与气味受体相互作用进行更详细的计算模拟，将成为实现规模化的巨大解锁点，”他补充道。
The long-term ambition is to create what Raspet calls a “Pantone for scent” — a reference to the universal color-matching system used across design and manufacturing industries — establishing the primary scent molecules from which any smell or flavor can be built. “The information has been there the whole time, waiting for the technology to catch up and a team with the right combination of expertise and obsession to unlock it,” Raspet said. “These ideas can now be made real, with Patina as the underlying intelligence layer.” 长期的目标是创造 Raspet 所说的“气味的潘通 (Pantone)”——参考设计和制造行业中使用的通用配色系统——建立起可以构建任何气味或味道的基础气味分子。“这些信息一直都在那里，等待着技术赶上来，等待着一个具备专业知识和痴迷程度的团队来解锁它，”Raspet 说。“现在，随着 Patina 作为底层智能层，这些想法终于可以成为现实。”