Osmo Receives $8.5 Million In Funding To Support Advancement In Ai-Enabled Insect Control

Nov 08, 2023•over 1 year ago

Amount Raised

$8.5 Million

CambridgeMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceAgriculture and FarmingBiotechnology

Investors

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Description

Osmo, a machine olfaction startup, announced the receipt of a $3.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance the company's AI-enabled scent platform for discovering and producing compounds that repel, attract, or destroy disease-carrying insects to improve animal and human health. The grant is in addition to a $5 million equity investment in Osmo that the foundation made at the company's January 2023 launch.

Company Information

Company

Osmo

Location

Cambridge, Maryland, United States

About

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 machine olfaction research that the team validated at Google Research, including a 2019 study that used Graph Neural Networks to predict the smell of a molecule from its structure. 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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