This young startup is taking on a fragrance industry that hasn’t changed in a almost half century

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.