Aryballe Technologies (www.aryballe-technologies.com), the pioneer in digital olfaction, has secured an additional €6.2 million in funding led by two new strategic investors, IFF, a global leader in taste, scent, and nutrition & ingredients (www.iff.com) and Hyundai Motor Company (www.hyundai.com), and its historical existing investors, including Catherine Dunand of CEMAG INVEST and Vincent Deltrieu of INNOVACOM. This investment comes as the demand for digital olfaction technology gains momentum.
The new round of equity financing is the second since the company’s inception in 2014 and follows a previous €3.1 million seed round led in 2016. It will be used to further advance its technology and market its solutions for specific use cases, including applications automotive, food & beverage, consumer appliances and flavor and fragrance industries. Last month, Aryballe announced the formation of the Digital Olfaction Automotive Consortium (DOAC), which will work to establish standards for odor measurement in the automotive industry and will further enable Aryballe in its mission to develop a universal smell sensor.
“Our passion for innovation is uniquely aligned with Aryballe’s technology in digital scent, a key pillar of our strategy,” says Nicolas Mirzayantz, Divisional CEO, Scent, for IFF. “We see digital olfaction as essential to quality control, developing new solutions for our customers, and to entering new industries. We are excited at the prospect of working together to push the boundaries of this technology.”
“Implementation of electronic nose technology requires integration of various fields including bio-chemistry, electronic engineering, AI,” said Yunseong Hwang, Vice President and Head of Open Innovation Investment in Hyundai Motor. “Through the partnership with Aryballe, Hyundai hopes to develop vehicle olfactory sensors to innovate vehicle experiences such as maintaining car cleanliness through detecting odorants and safety through sensing possible internal ignition for predictive maintenance purposes.”
“This is a significant new step for Aryballe and we are proud to strengthen our support,” says Aryballe board member Vincent Deltrieu, venture capital partner at INNOVACOM and investor since 2016. “The company provides a very promising solution solving major issues in the digital olfaction business. This new funding round illustrates INNOVACOM’s investment policy fostering industrial connections when meaningful for technology startups.”
Aryballe launched its first product, the NeOse Pro, at CES 2018, which delivers its unique olfaction platform in an easy-to-use, handheld unit. This next round of investment will allow the company to reduce the sensor size and scale up manufacturing to allow for distributed sensing networks that meet requirements of emerging applications, while also building out a universal database of odors with their proprietary machine learning models and algorithms.
“These new strategic partnerships will enable us to accelerate our technology’s development into miniature, affordable olfaction sensors that meet the needs of markets like self-driving cars and food manufacturing,” said Sam Guilaumé, Aryballe CEO. “We’re excited about the growth potential we have together to enhance our ability to deliver our solutions more broadly.”
For more information, contact Aryballe at pr@aryballe.com.
About Aryballe
Based in Grenoble, France, Aryballe combines biochemistry, advanced optics and machine learning to mimic the human sense of smell. Founded in 2014, Aryballe released its first product, the digital nose NeOse Pro, in early 2018. Fast, portable and sensitive to hundreds of odors, NeOsePro captures odor signatures for display and analysis via software solutions that enable better decision making for R&D, quality control, manufacturing and end user experiences. With operations in France and the USA, Aryballe works with global leaders in automotive, food & beverage, consumer appliances and flavor & fragrances.
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