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Koniku
Koniku is a California synthetic-biology company that builds 'wetware' - devices that fuse living, engineered neurons with silicon to smell the world. Its Konikore sensor programs biological receptors to detect odors, explosives, chemical vapors and disease biomarkers at sensitivities that rival a dog's nose, aiming to give machines a sense of smell for airport security, healthcare and industrial monitoring.
Alex Wiltschko
Alex Wiltschko is the founder and CEO of Osmo, a company teaching computers to read and write smell. An olfactory neuroscientist who spent roughly 18 years studying scent, he led the team at Google Brain that built an AI model predicting how a molecule smells from its chemical structure - work published in Science in 2023 as the Principal Odor Map. Osmo spun out of Google in 2022, and in 2024 it pulled off 'scent teleportation,' digitally capturing a fresh-cut summer plum and reprinting its smell in another room. In February 2026 the company raised a $70 million Series B led by Two Sigma Ventures.