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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

digital smell

Aryballe Launches New NeOse Advance, Digital “Smelling” Device

Digital olfaction company Aryballe announced today the launch of its new NeOse Advance hardware device and Aryballe Suite software. NeOse Advance is the company’s first product derived frorm its silicon photonics-based platform, which detects, records and recognizes smells.

Aryballe’s device works by attracting odor molecules emitted by different products and “smelling” them by analyzing peptides with chemical sensors and spectroscopy. It then creates a unique digital signature for each item, so bananas will have a specific odor signature while coffee will have another. The NeOse then records and creates a catalog of all these digital signatures in a database and uses them to help authenticate other items it encounters.

In the food world, the NeOse technology could have a number of applications. It can be used by food manufacturers to ensure consistency in production. Or it could assist with the verification of ingredients — for example, whether the vanilla or cocoa beans companies paid for are indeed the real thing. Another application the NeOse is currently being used for is to detect mold in grain storage.

In addition to the new NeOse Advance, Aryballe also launched the Aryballe Suite, which is the company’s first cloud-enabled software platform. With Aryballe Suite, users can access and customize odor data analysis for help with R&D projects and product consistency.

There are actually a few players in the digital smelling space. Aromyx uses AI to help analyze different odors. And Koniku uses protein molecules to detect different compounds that objects emit.

Aryballe will start delivering the NeOse Advance in June of this year. The company will sell the product directly, though it did not disclose pricing.

Aryballe Raises €6.2 Million for its Digital Nose

Aryballe, the French “digital olfaction” startup that builds a device that essentially mimics the smelling power of the human nose, announced today that it has raised a €6.2 Million ($7M USD) Series B round of funding led by International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) with participation from Hyundai Motor Company. This brings the total amount raised by Aryballe to €9.3 ($10.43M USD).

Aryballe debuted its NeOse Pro, a handheld device aimed at the B2B market that can be used to detect and identify odors, at CES in 2018. As Mike Wolf wrote last year:

The product works by attracting odor molecules into the device’s chamber where they then interact with chemical sensors. The device lights up the prism with an LED light and the device records optical signal transduction and then analyzes the odor signature and matches it against a database in the cloud.

In addition to the investment dollars, establishing the formal relationship with IFF’s massive database of fragrances will help augment Aryballe’s odor identification capabilities, and give IFF access to another application it can provide to its clients.

Applications for Aryballe’s technology include maintaining product consistency for something like coffee roasting — making sure each batch roasted smells the same, or ensuring authenticity of raw materials — or determining whether the vanilla a food maker received is artificial or natural.

Additionally, Aryballe is already talking with appliance manufacturers to place its digital olfaction into things like smart refrigerators and ovens. An embedded e-nose in these appliances could help detect food transformation, so your fridge would be able to smell when an item starts to spoil, or an oven could better know when something is done or burning. The company says we should start to see those Aryballe-enabled devices appear in 2020.

With the new money, Aryballe is looking to miniaturize its technology even further, perhaps embedding its technology into even smaller devices like food storage containers so they can give you a better sense of when your leftovers or fruits are going bad.

Aryballe is among a wave of companies looking to digitize our senses. Computer vision is used extensively in things like cashierless checkout in stores to see what we buy (and charge us automatically). Over this past weekend, IBM unveiled its Hypertaste platform to identify and classify liquids. Heck, Amazon has even applied for patents for its own refrigerator that smells.

While Aryballe is smaller than most of these other players, the relationship with IFF and its accompanying dataset, along with an actual working product, means it could lead the pack by more than an e-nose.