Category: In the news

Moodify raises $1.6M Funding for Advanced Functional Scents Company to present at IAA Frankfurt its joint solution with partner Valeo

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (PRWEB) SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

Moodify, an Israeli company that is developing advanced scent solutions for improved performance and well-being, today announced $1.6M funding from lead investor Next Gear Ventures, with participation from Toyota AI Ventures. The funding brings the total investment in Moodify to $2.3M.

“This investment will enable us to execute on our plan to establish the company as a leader in the market, while continuing to develop Moodify scents,” said Yigal Sharon, co-founder and CEO of Moodify. “The vote of confidence by Toyota AI Ventures, a leading investor in the mobility space, and Next Gear Ventures, one of the champions of automotive innovation, further indicates that there is a real need for Moodify’s groundbreaking technology. Many industries have started to realize the power and significance of smell, and we are very excited to be a pioneer in this novel field.”

Moodify’s scent technology harnesses the power of implicit and explicit smells by emitting safe, non-intrusive signals that have an immediate impact on emotional and physiological condition, for example, by masking bad odors, reducing stress, or waking up someone who is drowsy.

Moodify’s active scents are based on over 10 years of research on chemo-signals at the top science institute in Israel.

“We are very proud to deepen our partnership with Moodify after working closely together with the founders for the past 6 months through Drive Innovation Hub,” said Tal Cohen, General Partner of Next Gear Ventures and Drive TLV. “The company’s solutions for safety and well-being generate great interest not only from leading players in the mobility ecosystem but also from several other major industries offering numerous use cases. Although very powerful, using advanced scent technologies to solve-real world problems has very rarely been successfully achieved at scale, but we believe Moodify has great potential do so.”

“Our mission at Toyota AI Ventures is to explore new innovations, and so we’re excited by the potential of Moodify’s functional fragrance technology, for automotive applications and other use-cases,” said Jim Adler, founding managing director of Toyota AI Ventures. “Moodify’s scent solutions are based on years of scientific research that tap into the powerful impact that smell has on our sense of well-being – whether to calm us, alert us, or enhance the perception of our environment. It’s fascinating to experience the Moodify scents firsthand, and we look forward to their products becoming widely available.”

Moodify’s first product, Moodify White, will be exhibited at the IAA show in Frankfurt this September in the VALEO booth. VALEO, a leader in automotive interior air quality, wants to complete its product portfolio with a solution that removes the negative impact of interior bad odors, and had teamed up with Moodify to develop an innovative product.

About Moodify
Co-founded in 2017 by Yigal Sharon and Dr. Yaniv Mama, Moodify develops unique active scents that enable people to improve their performance, enhance their well being and increase their safety. Based on more than a decade of research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Moodify’s scents affect the olfactory sense in a non-invasive and safe manner. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Moodify was selected for Capsula, a TAU & the Israeli Government accelerator, and is a part of the Renault-Nissan Innovation Lab (TLV CityZone) and DriveTLV innovation Center for Smart Mobility.

About Next Gear Ventures
Next Gear Ventures is a leading smart mobility focused Israeli VC fund investing in startups at the forefront of smart mobility revolution. Next Gear is leveraging its strategic relationship with Drive TLV with its global mobility partners network to identify, mold and work with Israel’s top startups. Next Gear ventures and Drive have became the go to address for top early stage Israeli startups. 

About Toyoya AI Ventures
Toyota AI Ventures is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups from around the world. Toyota’s first standalone VC fund, Toyota AI Ventures focuses on investments in areas like artificial intelligence, data, cloud, mobility, and robotics. For more information, please visit https://www.toyota-ai.ventures.

Software is eating the world and now it has recently begun smelling it as well. The fragrance industry is starting to go through deep digital transformation processes that address its core competencies, and naturally so, is thus very affected by artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast to information-based industries such as finance and insurance, fragrance took longer to undergo digital transformation because entry barriers for startups and innovation, in general, are higher. CapEx (capital expenditures) involving chemical compounds and labs, together with higher OpEx (operational expenditure) for interdisciplinary talent, make it less susceptible to disruption.

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Fragrance is more difficult to digitize because there is less academic applied olfaction research work offering technologies ripe for commercialization; and because olfactory nomenclature is limited and less articulated than other senses. The latter not only creates difficulties in generating data sets for AI but also makes it challenging to have AI talent reach the profound subject matter understanding that is so necessary to develop adequate solutions. In addition, the widely common (and justified) perception of perfumery as an art and craft creates a basic distrust for AI solutions in fragrance.

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AI in Fragrance

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Nonetheless, AI is beginning to penetrate fragrance. Similarly to other industries, it started from applications that are not unique to fragrance, such as analyzing consumer behavior as recorded in e-commerce transactions and social media for the purpose of creating fragrance products that sell better. But also recent years innovations in machine learning, bioinformatics, and drug discovery have posed an opportunity to develop AI models that touch the core of fragrance design and formulation and can actually make computers sense and articulate olfactory perception. Publicity of such innovation made stakeholders in fragrance more open to risk resources for progress. The integration of AI in core fragrance capabilities manifests in several types of applications: formula-to-brief recommendation, formulation, sensing, and new molecule design. The formula to-brief recommendation is the ability to match existing fragrance formulas to new briefs. It enables fragrance houses to match formulas out of their 50,000+ formula portfolios to new customer briefs that could benefit existing non-exclusive formulas and enable fragrance houses to continue monetizing them.

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Originally published on Perfumer & Flavorist

The Israeli company has developed a platform in collaboration with leading Weizmann Institute researchers that enables molecular-level accurate control in the design of scent

Moodify, an Israeli startup that develops technology for the digitization of scent, announced on Monday that it has recently completed raising $8 million in equity financing. CPG giant Procter & Gamble is a key investor in the round. Other investors include Toyota Ventures, OurCrowd, Next Gear Venture Partners, and Taisho Pharmaceuticals.

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Backed By

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,Toyota AI Ventures

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https://medium.com/toyota-ai-ventures/q-a-with-yigal-sharon-founder-and-ceo-of-moodify-2da5b7bc3374

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Las Vegas, January 7, 2020. Valeo and Moodify, an Israeli company that develops advanced scent solutions for improved personal performance and well-being, are announcing their first collaboration. Together, they will bring to market a ground breaking solution to car malodor.n

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The solution is based on the smart diffusion of a special scent, Moodify White, based on 10 years of research at Israel’s top technology research institute. Moodify White is especially attractive because it effectively masks the perception of foul smells in cars, including cigarettes, mold, and decay. Moodify White is made entirely of environmentally friendly, hypoallergenic, and non-intrusive compounds. The first version of Moodify White will be released in early 2020, and will be available in samples in Valeo and Moodify’s exhibit area at CES.n

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Prof. Dr. Georges de Pelsemaeker, Health and Wellbeing Director at Valeo, commented: “Combining Valeo’s deep knowledge of the automotive industry, and its expertise in cabin air quality solutions, together with Moodify’s technological capacity, enables us to bring to market an ultimate solution to bad smell in cars, a problem that pains the entire automotive supply chain”.“Moodify White is the harbinger of the digital scent revolution. For hundreds of years, scent problems were addressed with a simple add-more-perfume approach. We bring neuroscience and chemo-signals to the table. With our unique technology, any scent solution could be tailor-made as easily as printing documents.” Said Yigal Sharon, CEO of Moodify. “I am fortunate to collaborate with Valeo, which gave its indispensable automotive domain expertise and professionalism, and thankful to our investors Toyota AI Ventures and Next Gear Ventures that back us and make this happen.”n

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