Digital scent and taste representation company wins $250,000 investment from Radicle Growth
Aromyx, a California-based company, was named the winner of the Radicle Challenge at the World Agri-Tech 2019 Pitch Day in San Francisco. Selected from a pool of eight finalists, Aromyx has won a $250,000 investment and mentoring from Radicle Growth.
Aromyx’s technology pioneered the creation of quantified, digital representations of scent and taste. This technology directly measures how odors and flavors are perceived by consumers and measures off-flavors or contaminants in raw materials to mitigate issues before they hit production lines. Aromyx’s proprietary database, Allegory, provides a basis for machine learning to analyze flavors and fragrances in a way that was not possible before.
“Their ability to digitize smells is unmatched and will have many applications throughout the ag and food value chains,” said Kirk Haney, Radicle Growth’s Managing Partner. “This big data platform is also a valuable resource for companies looking to tailor their offerings to consumer preferences, drive market adoption, control the quality of raw materials to prevent spoilage and increase efficiency in the food system overall. We are extremely impressed with Aromyx’s technology, team and the impact we can have by accelerating the development and adoption of this technology.”
Unlike the funding that most seed-stage companies have access to, the financial investment from Radicle is accompanied by a custom acceleration program. Through investing the amount they need to be successful at seed-stage, preparing them for their next round of funding, and providing them access to Radicle’s platform, Radicle will help Aromyx revolutionize one of the most important (but often most underplayed) aspects of the food system: a digital representation of taste and smell.
Bringing new technology
“Winning the Radicle Challenge is a major milestone validating Aromyx’s technology. While the technology has applications for a broad range of industries, agriculture is a primary focus and we see massive opportunities to disrupt current practices,” said Josh Silverman, Aromyx, Inc. CEO. “Bringing a disruptive technology to an established marketplace is not easy, and we are excited to be partnering with Radicle and their network to accelerate our development efforts and find the optimal product-market fits.”
The Radicle Challenge called on agtech and foodtech start-ups from around the world that have received a minimum investment of $100,000 or have gone through a recognized seed accelerator program to apply for investment. Hundreds of start-ups representing technology breakthroughs across ag and food applied to participate in the Pitch Day and the finalists (Agrospheres, AgTrace, EscaVox, Napigen, Tarfin, Traive, and Tulaa) received pre-Pitch Day coaching from Radicle Growth. Finistere Ventures, Nomad Technology Consulting, Corteva AgriScience and Bayer Crop Science had judges on the panel to help Radicle Growth select the winner.
Aromyx has built a solution for the digital capture of scent and taste — the EssenceChip — placing human olfactory and taste receptors onto a disposable biochip, with a digital readout. The Aromyx platform will be invaluable to large corporations in the food & beverage, consumer packaged goods, chemicals and agriculture industries, as it will enable digital manipulation of taste and scent, akin to how we work with images and sounds today.
Like visual recognition in the 1980’s and speech recognition in the 1990’s, olfactory and taste recognition technology is set to advance — and Aromyx has a proprietary breakthrough technology with many enterprise, defense, consumer and therapeutic applications.
