Company continues to lead digital olfaction market with expanded headcount and product innovation.
To keep up the company’s momentum, Aryballe added several key positions to support the further industrialization of its technology. The amount of field application engineers alone increased by 166% as the company ramped up customer support for helping organizations across industries integrate sensors into their applications and interpret the data for meaningful business solutions. The company also began working with leaders in consumer industries to develop digital olfaction norms and standards that will help translate traditional human panel scoring to the company’s device outputs.
“We continue to see consumer markets, specifically automotive and consumer appliances, demonstrate a real need for digital olfaction, and we’re committed to helping them deliver the power of digital odor data in a low cost, high volume solution,” said Sam Guilaume, CEO, Aryballe. “It’s this commitment that has driven Aryballe’s banner year in 2019 and contributed to the incredible progress we’ve made across all aspects of the organization as we transform from a technology company to a solutions-focused company. We’re thrilled to be at the helm of bringing digital olfaction to the masses, and we look forward to building on this tremendous momentum in the year ahead.”
Automotive materials characterization
Just as food, or even other people, can generate unpleasant odors in vehicles, so too can materials, such as plastics or fabrics. I’m sure you’re familiar with that “new car smell”. What if automotive manufacturers could standardize that new car smell? Or better control odor from materials by eliminating the ones that don’t emit the most pleasant of smells? Odor sensors could feasibly enable automotive providers to develop branding strategies around their tailor-made, unique “new car smell”, or the opposite of that and eliminate it altogether. For instance, while Americans may find the new car odor to be pleasant, other countries, such as China, expect a new car to have absolutely no smell at all. Manufacturers could use odor sensors to monitor the cabin, therefore, and adjust materials as necessary to ensure a pleasant experience that matches cultural expectations.
Of course, we recognize that smell is subjective, and odors assessed by panel testers today often present important variations while lacking consistency, all due to their individual health status, personal experiences and memory, as well as cultural context, among others. This is where odor data comes into play. Through pattern recognition and analysis, we can conjugate objectivity by setting odor standards within vehicles.
Safety
As mentioned in our last blog post, safety is a huge trend currently transforming the automotive industry. It also happens to be an area where digital olfaction can come in hand. Specifically, by using odor sensors to diagnose car failures early and before anything catastrophic might occur.
For instance, ageing brakes have a very unique smell to them. Or maybe there is an oil leak, and it’s dripping on a hot motor, which could cause a fire. A heating wire could also be the precursor to something as benign as a short circuit to something more catastrophic like the overheating of an entire system or assembly. The detection of the distinct odor of a heating wire casing could enable more preventative alerts before a catastrophic failure occurs. Aryballe actually performed an experiment with our NeOse Pro on two common types of wire found in automotive systems, which you can learn more about here.
The point is that each of these situations could be prevented by placing odor sensors in well-defined areas aimed to detect early warning signs and provide objective safety data.
How does it all work?
I’m sure you’re thinking at this point, “Yes, this all sounds great, but how does it actually work?” At Aryballe, we’ve developed the NeOse Pro, in which we digitally capture and mimic the human sense of smell for display and store the information in a database for future odor analysis.
If you think about the human sense of smell, it’s really two parts – the nose and the brain. The nose detects the odor signal via proteins in the organ and our brains interpret what these signals mean based on our life experiences and learning. We’re doing the same thing – our O-Cell technology has a proprietary combination of protein fragments (peptides) that responds to odors, creating a picture of the smell (an odor signature). Our software is the brain that interprets what these odor signatures are in the real world based on our database of odor signatures. Essentially, our technology works just like our sense of smell, and right now we are working with leading partners in our core markets to learn as many odors as we can to build our learning and our database.
One of those partners is DENSO, who recently joined our Digital Olfaction Automotive Consortium (DOAC). This is a collaborative forum made up of the world’s top automotive players, with a shared goal of delivering state-of-the-art knowledge on odors, use cases and odor sensing, and to establish standards for odor measurement across the entire automotive industry value chain.
Keep an eye out for white papers coming out of the DOAC, where we’ll continue to provide updates on product requirements to material standard settings.
Additional 2019 Business Highlights Include:
Corporate Momentum
- Secured an additional €6.2 million in funding led by International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) and Hyundai Motor Company, alongside historical investors CEMAG INVEST and INNOVACOM
- Moved from the CEA Grenoble lab to an independent office space in Grenoble, France. U.S. headquarters also moved into the Bell Works Coworking community in Holmdel, New Jersey
Product Innovation
- More than doubled its intellectual property portfolio, growing the company’s patents from seven to 17 in 2019
- Witnessed massive technology improvement and can now detect 35% of odors at or below the human detection level versus 10% of odors a year ago
Market Leadership
- Aryballe’s Deputy CEO and Co-founder Tristan Rousselle spoke at key industry conferences, including MEMS World Summit, Microtech Innovation Summit 2019, and Sensor Solutions International Conference
Strategic Partnerships
- Launched the Digital Olfaction Automotive Consortium (DOAC) with key players across the automotive industry, including DENSO
To learn more about Aryballe, visit the company’s website. The company will also be at CES 2020 at Suite 30-102 in the Venetian Hotel.
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, NeOse Pro 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, consumer appliances and flavor & fragrance industries.
