OW Smell Made Digital (OW) has raised £2.2M in a pre-Series A funding round. Parkwalk Advisors, the UK’s most active investor in university spinouts, led the raise by investing £1.5 million. OW has also been awarded a £0.7 million grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, as part of its Investor Partnerships Programme.

Founded in 2019, as a spinout from the University of Sussex and associated with University College London, OW has developed proprietary technology to redefine the way humans experience smell. OW is developing one of the world’s first digital platforms for creating and delivering scents. The start-up has combined Artificial Intelligence and scent databases with new hardware to ‘print’ smells.

Dr Emanuela Maggioni CEO, CTO & Co-Founder, commented on the raise: “Smell can be our most powerful sense and only now are we realising the potential of technology to translate it for experience, welfare and health. This technology has enormous commercial applications which this new investment will help us unlock.”

OW’s first market application for its digital scent technology aims to improve sleep. A good night’s sleep is crucial for health and wellbeing, however, 74% of adults report bad sleep quality which costs the UK economy an estimated £40 billion annually. Scientific research has provided strong evidence that scents can have a profound effect on an individual’s emotions and improve sleep quality. OW’s technology detects key indicators of sleep using biofeedback devices, such as smart watches, and then delivers personalised scents as a dynamic intervention to improve all the sleep stages: going to sleep, maintaining sleep and waking up.

OW plans to licence its AI platform and hardware technology to industry partners that will deliver personalised scents for enhancing sleep. Sleep Tech is the first market ready application for OW’s technology – but in the future the company plans to target multiple major markets including digital media, retail, immersive events, the automotive industry and many potential health-related applications.

John Pearson, Chief Investment Officer at Parkwalk Advisors, said: “OW is a fantastic example of the cutting-edge technology created in UK universities. OW is helping to bring the experience of smell in line with major advances in both video and sound. Digitalising smell and delivering personalised scents into homes is a major step forward in immersive experiences and has vast potential.”

OW’s innovative scent technology has been validated by academics and already deployed in real-world environments including in healthcare and research settings, along with R&D programmes by major corporations including top-tier FMCGs. This latest funding round will allow OW to conduct extensive validation studies for sleep interventions, train its AI algorithms using biofeedback and commit additional investment in IP to complement its multiple granted and pending patents relevant to Sleep Tech and other markets.