Scentience
"Building the world's largest continuously learning platform for robotic chemical perception."
US startup designing neuromorphic olfactory sensors, edge AI models, and developer APIs to give robots a sense of smell for navigation, security, and.
Scentience, Inc. is a robotics technology startup founded in 2024 and based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. The company was founded by Kordel K. France, PhD, an AI architect and roboticist conducting research in machine olfaction at the University of Texas at Dallas. Scentience's stated mission is to build the world's largest continuously learning platform for robotic chemical perception.
The company's hardware flagship is the S1 Olfactory Processing Unit (OPU), a neuromorphic silicon chip designed to perform real-time molecular sensing and computational chemistry. The S1 is packaged to integrate into diverse robotic form factors including humanoids, unmanned aerial vehicles, and mobile service robots. The first-generation S0 OPU has been superseded by the S1. The S1 is available via waitlist.
On the software side, Scentience developed the OVLM (Olfaction-Vision-Language Model), described as the world's first fully unified multimodal model fusing olfactory, visual, and language reasoning. The OVLM runs entirely at the edge using Int8 quantization for embedded deployment and is available on the Apple App Store. A companion OVL-Action Model (OVLAM) is designed specifically for scent-based robot navigation, enabling a robot to localize and track an odor source through a space. Developer access is provided through the Scentience Olfaction APIs, documented at scentience.ai/api-docs. Model weights are published on HuggingFace (scentience-ovlc-v1 joint olfaction-vision-language classifiers).
The Sigma data collection app (iOS, Android in development) captures six time-aligned modalities — olfaction, vision, audio, language, inertial, and environmental data — and feeds ScentNet, the first open multimodal dataset integrating chemical olfaction with vision, depth/LiDAR, audio, language, and inertial data.
Target applications include security robotics (explosives and narcotics detection), search and rescue, UAV olfactory navigation, humanoid robot sensory systems, robotic surgery screening, home air quality monitoring, and VR/XR scene enhancement. The company has published at least five arXiv papers in 2025-2026 covering olfactory inertial odometry, sensor calibration, diffusion graph neural networks for hazard robotics navigation, and simulation-to-real olfactory stacks. Multiple patents are pending on the OVLM technology. The company is bootstrapped with no external funding rounds announced as of mid-2026.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
S1 Olfactory Processing Unit
- Model: S1 OPU
- Launch Year: 2024
Neuromorphic silicon chip for real-time molecular sensing and chemical analysis, designed to integrate into humanoids, UAVs, and mobile robots.
OVLM Olfaction-Vision-Language Model
- Model: OVLM
- Launch Year: 2025
World's first unified edge-deployable olfaction-vision-language model enabling interwoven scent, visual, and language reasoning on embedded hardware.
OVL-Action Model
- Model: OVLAM
- Launch Year: 2025
Companion action model enabling scent-based robot navigation and odor source localization for mobile robots and UAVs.
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Contact Scentience
WEBSITE
https://scentience.aiHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2024
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
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