The perfume began with a practical difficulty: how to hold a petri dish out of an aeroplane window. In October 2021, Jasmina Aganovic went looking for the living things inside clouds. She brought a colleague, some laboratory supplies and a question that would eventually become a fragrance. The sky was being asked to contribute to product development. It had yet to sign anything.
There had been a more convenient plan. Drones would collect the samples. Massachusetts restrictions complicated that idea, so Aganovic needed a plane and someone willing to fly it. Her neighbors, Kenn and Erika, turned out to be hobby pilots as well as engineers. They were curious enough to help. A conversation close to home had supplied the missing aviation department.
The flight lasted 20 minutes. Sampling took about two. Jaide, her colleague and a metabolic engineer, worked with the dishes while the plane slowed at altitude. Attachments helped secure the equipment. Aganovic later described herself as terrified. The finished fragrance would be called Cloud Reverie, a name considerably more restful than its founder’s experience of gathering the raw material.
By April 2026, that expedition had become a perfume developed with Daniela Andrier. The elapsed years matter. Aganovic’s career is full of apparently unlikely connections, but the connections rarely become products overnight. A question travels through other people’s expertise, technical setbacks, creative decisions and the considerable business of persuading someone to care.
An engineer learns to sell an idea
Aganovic studied chemical and biological engineering at MIT, graduating in 2009. She had initially been interested in business, choosing engineering during her first year because she thought it would open doors across industries. Beauty already interested her. The ingredients, the formulas and the explanations on packaging offered a set of puzzles she wanted to understand.
Her early work included Fresh and Living Proof. At Fresh, she learned the machinery of product development. At Living Proof, her responsibilities connected research and development with communication, including presenting products on QVC. It was an education in the gap between knowing how something works and helping another person understand why it belongs in their life.
A television shopping audience is unlikely to award extra marks for an elegant technical explanation that leaves the product unsold. Aganovic learned to notice what resonated. That experience helps explain why her later work gives so much room to the consumer’s imagination. She can follow the science while remaining interested in what happens when someone encounters the finished bottle.
At Hungry Fish Media, later NutraClick, she encountered the changing mechanics of online marketing. She proposed a beauty brand sold online and began managing the process from development through to the customer. Stages of Beauty started in 2010. It became Bona Clara, with a sales approach built around representatives and their own digital networks.
It was a substantial experiment in how people discover and buy beauty products. In 2014, around 150 representatives were actively selling each month. The brand eventually closed. That ending belongs in the story alongside the later funding rounds. Aganovic had learned about making products, building a brand and managing people by being responsible for all three.
“I’m impatient by nature.”
Jasmina Aganovic, reflecting on entrepreneurship
She has also described herself as somewhat introverted, with networking requiring a deliberate push beyond her comfort zone. Her advice about time is revealing: judging progress every day can obscure what becomes visible over a longer stretch. Coming from someone impatient, it sounds like a rule acquired through experience rather than an inclination she finds especially easy.
The flowers came before the perfume
Mother Dirt followed, with Aganovic leading the brand as president. The work deepened her interest in biology’s possibilities for beauty. In November 2019, she announced that she was joining Ginkgo Bioworks as an entrepreneur-in-residence. She and Ginkgo co-founder Jason Kelly had first met over lunch in Kendall Square years earlier. A professional connection had become a place to develop her next company.
Arcaea publicly launched in October 2021, announcing a $78 million Series A. Its investors included CHANEL, Givaudan, Cascade Investment, Viking Global and Wittington Ventures. The business would develop ingredients for other companies while also creating brands and products of its own. That structure gave Aganovic two routes for bringing work out of the laboratory.
Series A financing announced October 27, with beauty companies and financial investors backing the same venture.
She calls the approach expressive biology. The phrase places creative possibility at the center: what new experiences might become available if beauty could draw on more of the living world? Arcaea’s stated ambition includes reducing dependence on extracting ingredients from plants, animals and petrochemicals. Those are goals for how the industry could make things, as well as what it could make.
The extinct flowers supplied an early answer. Ginkgo researchers had been working with preserved plant specimens and their genetic information before Future Society existed. Christina Agapakis, then Ginkgo’s creative director, helped develop the work with the Harvard herbaria. Aganovic saw the possibility of giving that research a further life through fragrance. She has been clear that the idea came from several places.
Future Society arrived in 2023 with six fragrances. Three perfumers worked on the original collection. The involvement of multiple people was deliberate: the flowers could inspire different interpretations. Some compositions considered the environment a plant had inhabited; others approached its history differently. Genetic information opened a door. Someone still had to decide what the room should feel like.
Aganovic has explained that making an exact replica was never the purpose. The flowers’ stories could continue through an act of imagination grounded in research. That distinction gives the project its character. The scientific work supplies possibilities, while perfumery brings judgment, taste and emotional intent. No one needs to pretend the bottle contains a preserved afternoon from a vanished forest.
The distance between a dish and a bottle
The cloud experiment made that division of labor especially visible. Back in the laboratory, the samples grew quickly. The living cultures were subsequently destroyed under laboratory safety instructions, but genetic material was preserved for sequencing. The project continued through the information that remained. The literal contents of the dishes would never make the full journey to the perfume counter.
By 2022, the team had identified 13 distinct microbes. Further work pointed to the genetic capacity to produce 57 scent molecules. Those findings became a creative starting point. They did not amount to 57 finished ingredients poured into a flask. Aganovic’s account describes a process of reading biological possibilities and then working with a perfumer to interpret them.
Biological data → a perfumer’s creative brief → a finished fragrance.
Research figures describe genetic potential, not a bottle’s ingredient count.
The possible molecules included associations familiar to perfumery: almond, honeyed sweetness, powdery notes, white flowers and vanilla. A sky full of organisms turned out to suggest a surprisingly recognizable palette. Aganovic was interested in that recognition, in the idea that something beyond ordinary sensory reach might still feel connected to the world people already know.
Andrier translated the research into Cloud Reverie, with notes including aldehydes, iris, vanilla, oceanic fucus and musks. The composition was conceived to evolve continuously, rather than follow a conventional progression of top, heart and base. The final decisions belonged to a perfumer responding to a story, a dataset and an idea about change.
A little less certainty, a little more possibility
Aganovic’s approach leaves room for customers to surprise her too. When Future Society collaborated with K18, the team sent roughly 100 discovery kits to its staff and community. People argued for favorites. Floating Forest emerged as the choice. Picking a scent meant considering the setting in which someone would use it and the character of the partner brand.
Recognition has followed: Inc. included her in its 2025 Female Founders 500, and CEW named her among its 2025 Innovators. By September 2026, she was discussing another Future Society launch, Base Scent. Yet her public explanations keep returning to a broader interest: giving science a role in how beauty expresses something, alongside its role in how products perform.
There are smaller details that keep the founder in view. In an early interview, her preferred drink was a double-shot latte, her indulgence chocolate and her advice to avoid taking herself too seriously. She had spent time in Barcelona between jobs and was reading Eduardo Mendoza’s The City of Marvels. The engineer has always had other things on her reading list.
Her ambitions for fragrance include hope and a closer relationship with nature. The work gives those abstract wishes some physical objects: six interpretations of vanished flowers, a cloud-inspired composition, a bottle someone can pick up. It also supplies a useful account of invention. A question becomes more interesting when other people get involved. Sometimes the next person needed is a perfumer in Paris. Sometimes it is the neighbor with a pilot’s licence.