Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel Joins Osmo to Develop New Perfume Molecules and Effects via Unique AI Technologies

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Osmo, a pioneer in AI and scent, is pleased to announce the hiring of Master Perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. Laudamiel has 25 years of experience in fine fragrance creations, composing widely acclaimed scents for brands or personalities like Abercrombie & Fitch, Beyoncé, Estée Lauder, Thierry Mugler, and Tom Ford, as well as for museums and art installations. Also a graduate chemist, he has won numerous accolades, including Chemistry Olympiads medals and a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Institute of Art and Olfaction.

As Osmo's newly appointed Master Perfumer, Laudamiel will help guide the Cambridge-based startup in bridging traditional fragrance industry expertise and innovative approaches to fragrance development. In addition to creating scents that replicate existing smells, he aims to shape novel perfume styles of the future, utilizing ingredients with new smells and artistic effects.

"I am thrilled to be joining the Osmo team building the world's first AI platform for scent molecule discovery," said Laudamiel. "The fragrance industry has mastered complex plant extractions, scent chemistries, and manufacturing at scale. But when it comes to discovering new scent molecules, there is a new opportunity to explore the billions of untapped molecules that human noses cannot screen on their own."

Computers have been able to digitize vision and hearing, but not smell—our deepest and most complex sense. Osmo brings together frontier AI and olfactory science to solve this historic challenge. The company has already built an AI system that rapidly discovers novel fragrance ingredients and has created notes praised by master perfumers, industry experts, and double-blind odor panels. One of its first steps to giving computers a sense of smell is to use its AI-based map of odor to build safe and environmentally-friendly fragrance ingredients.

The fragrance industry relies on ingredients that are becoming increasingly limited due to stricter safety, sustainability, and environmental standards. To develop replacements for these ingredients, chemists currently rely on manual methods or modify existing molecules until they obtain a promising candidate. Osmo's technology is improving this process by accelerating the search for ingredients that meet these higher standards and bringing more focus and consistency to fragrance development.

"Our technology is designed to complement the best expertise of the fragrance industry, by augmenting the skills of master perfumers," said Alex Wiltschiko, CEO of Osmo. "We are excited to welcome Christophe, a unique talent who embraces novel scent chemistry and engineering to elevate his art. As one of the earliest members of our team, he strengthens our commitment to creating fragrances that not only delight consumers but are also sustainable and environmentally responsible."

As Osmo moves forward with this exciting new partnership, the company remains committed to its mission of giving computers a sense of smell. Its odor-mapping technology can lead to new products that promote better health, enhance culinary experiences, and even create new forms of artistic expression. With Christophe Laudamiel on board, Osmo will continue bringing artistry and technology together—to pursue the highest levels of scientific innovation and to improve well-being globally.

About Osmo
Launched in January 2023 with $60 million Series A funding led by Lux Capital and Google Ventures, Osmo fuses machine learning, data science, psychophysics, olfactory neuroscience, electrical engineering, and chemistry in a multi-disciplinary approach to digitizing scent. Osmo's work is grounded in digital olfaction research that the team validated at Google Research, including two pivotal studies that used Graph Neural Networks to predict the smell of a molecule from its structure and to investigate the biological underpinnings of odor similarity. The company has begun work in the flavor and fragrance market to create a new generation of better, safer, environmentally-friendly 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.

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SOURCE Osmo