Founder's Story - The Sense That Controls Your Emotions—And Why Tech Is Finally Hacking It | Ep 305 with Siddhartha Kunti Founder of Studio SK

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Daniel interviews Siddhartha Kunti on Founder’s Story to explore whether scent can become a digital medium, like sound or video. Siddhartha shares the moment that sparked his shift from AI surgical planning into olfactory innovation, why smell is uniquely tied to emotion and memory, and what it could unlock in healthcare, education, wellness, and immersive consumer experiences. Key Discussion Points:Siddhartha explains how a Japan distillery tour triggered his obsession with decoding flavor and aroma using AI pattern recognition, leading him to analyze hundreds of beverages and massive molecular datasets. He breaks down why smell has taken so long to digitize, pointing to its complexity, the millions of molecules involved, and the human variability in perception shaped by culture, environment, and biology. He discusses the idea of building an “LLM for scent” by combining molecular data with subjective human labeling across global populations. The conversation expands into real world implications, from COVID’s impact on mental health through smell loss, to Alzheimer’s detection through body odor changes, to scent driven therapy like recreating a loved one’s smell in everyday life. Takeaways:Smell is treated as the forgotten sense in education, yet it silently drives memory, emotion, appetite, attraction, and wellbeing. Digitizing scent requires both objective chemistry and subjective human experience, making AI essential for identifying patterns at scale. The next wave of consumer and healthcare innovation may include scent enhanced experiences in retail, gaming, wellness, and hospitals, not just entertainment. Siddhartha’s work argues that the future of technology is not only smarter, but more human and sensory. Closing Thoughts:This episode reframes scent as a frontier technology, not a novelty, and highlights why the most powerful innovations often start as ideas that sound ridiculous until they suddenly become obvious. Siddhartha’s journey is a reminder that entrepreneurship is sometimes about giving a language to something humanity has always felt, but never fully understood. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So, so, Darth, when I read what you do, I was blown away. I'm like, is this even real? And you know, it reminded me of something. Back a couple years ago, I was at a CES, the consumer electronic show. And they had a TV from LG, I believe. And that TV was adding scent into the TV. And they were talking about how you would watch something on TV and then you would smell it. And I thought that was the most fascinating. anything. It never came out to consumer. Like it didn't come out to selling a consumer, but I told that story to so many people because I was really blown away by what this could be and what this could mean for the future. And

since then, I've never heard anyone really talk about this digitization of scent stuff. But I have to understand can you explain exactly you walked away from a certain life to focus on this? Why? And what exactly is it? Yeah, no, thanks, Dan.

It's a pleasure to be here. And to be honest, it's been a real journey of discovery. Because just taking one step back, I was in 2018, I was traveling with my wife in Japan. I was doing a tour in the Suntory-Axia distillery, which we speak to the street. And what are the key things that's the whole line got me hooked was the tour guide saying, the reason we probably had, probably what was the keyword, probably had fresh green apple taste in his whiskey is due to the purity of the water in the mountains behind us.

And at that stage, I was working in AI with the team of surgery for planning. We were looking at how we could use AI, which implants in the patient's body. And so I figured, like, what if we could use a patron recognition that AI is so good at to actually understand where flavor comes from? because I've always been very exposed to food and flavor and scent. My grandfather was beekeeper, so every summer, winter, like, we will always compare and it reflects on the honey and look at this one that's before floral nose.

This one has before orange, and also I've always had this in my youth and throughout my teens, but never really professionally speaking. And then in 2018, when I had this, like, this moment of, hey, actually, we can use the eye to maybe decode where flavor and aerobocom from as went down a rabbit hole. I was very fortunate to meet Sissotolas, who's also one of the leading experts in the orthodox species between research for 30 years. And so that's what got me down this journey of discovering

and try to understand how we as humans interact with molecules, millions of molecules that are around us. I mean, the point you make about a television is like, well, it's such an important element it in our daily lives, but yet it's also the least understood simply because it is so complex. The Swedish professor, Yonap Olf, all of Sunday in Stockholm University, wrote even a book about it, calling it the forgotten sentence because at school you get taught to read, to write, to see, to hear, but we never get taught to smell. And yet, smell is such an important part of our lives

with food, eating, the choice of your partner with pheromones. Like, nowadays people wear a lot of perfume which in a way of masks they are our national body owners but i believe in london a couple of years ago they used to do these pheromone parties where people who wear a t-shirt for a week put the t-shirt in a bag and then all of the t-shirts were like laid out onto a table and you would basically choose a partner based on on scent sniffing out a t-shirt as opposed to yeah going say with perfumes and everything so um It's something that, yeah, I think I was naturally grown to it. And being in technology, free printing AI before that,

I think prime would be like going to this. Yeah, you bring up something interesting. I was watching the Learning Channel like 20 years ago, and I'll never forget, they did a study where they took, where they had men wear a shirt that was sweaty, and then they had women guess who they were more attracted to based on a bunch of women smelling different shirts. And that got me into, there was like a few years where I was like really into researching.

I was buying pheromones online. Like I wanted to see what this would do and the reactions that people have is very, very interesting. So why do you think? And I know, and I've read here that scent is the only sense that's directly wired to the emotional center of the brain. So why do you think it's taken us until 2026 to really bridge the gap? between technology and scent. It's an excellent question because, as you say, like, it's been, I think even in the 90s already, there was the, like, Smeloscope

where you could go to the cinema and there were, like, perhaps a sauce off. So, like, send come out. I think it's the least understood and the least digitized, because it's also the most complex. We have millions of molecules around us. And then besides, say, like, the objective molecular component, you also have the human factor, because as as you all know what may be what might smell to you as vanilla might smell as the origin to somebody else or they might just label it differently because smell is not just molecules hitting your zero factory receptors it's also the cultural connotation how you describe things like dung might be labeled is it's bad smelling in some in some societies but it's almost like status symbol in in in other society so there's

a huge cultural connotation and individual impact on scent as well, like where you live the pollution levels, what type of food you have, where you aggregate sites. All of those things make you perceive smell different than that I would perceive. So that's also I believe why it's taken quite long for science and research to get to the point of actually a better understanding because you need the objective scientific chemical part, but he also needs to like the subjective human cultural part and I think it's something that we could probably only figure out with AI to really dive into those those massive data sets and they're trying to somehow decode and then look at paper it's like my first project i chemically analyzed 800 and

30 beverages of which 690 whiskeys and that alone was like 65 000 lines of molecular data that's a lot for a human to analyze well i think it makes me think of like a sommelier who can smell a wine. I think it's like part of the test. You have to be able to smell the wine and know other region and then I smell it and I'm like, I don't know, it smells like the same thing like the 45 other ones I've smelled, right? So do you, so I could see where like the subjectiveness, but then you have people that have really mastered this ability and this art. So when you think of like how AI is going to play into this and what this will unlock like for the good of humanity, do you have to build like an LLM of sense?

How will AI even do this? And then what will this bring to humanity or what are you hoping to achieve with it? Yeah, I mean, you definitely know your onions. It's true. I think an LLM of scent, I think, is sort of like a good first stepping stone. And like having so like a massive data set of molecules, like molecular data. And then as much to say human or say suburb. objective data that sort of like match to it.

And then data from, I think, lots of populations, not just Western, but Asian, Africa. I think that's what we really believe is for like, send LLM. I think that's definitely a good stepping stone. And then as you say, like the impact of that, which I think is tremendous. Like, COVID

showed us what society looks like if people lose their sense of smell. Like, you start skating glen all of a sudden, when you go to people, you hug them, there's no longer any, any, impact cues and the long-term impact of not being able to smell like anosmic people and actually that you can pretty depress because a lot of the the way your brain work,

it's also often triggered subconsciously by its smell. Like if you walk past the bakery, maybe it takes you back to your grandmother baking cake or if you're walking fast alone, it's been more, a freshly mold grass can take you back to put your kid to bake software. So I think there's a lot of research going to do feel. now, especially since COVID. Where can it lead to? I can just to give one example. In the NHS, I think about 10 years ago,

they discovered a woman who was able to sniff out Alzheimer's. So about a year before her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she detected this, the change in his body odor. So the impact of better understanding smell, I think, is phenomenal from guiding people to better food choices, to disease detection, truck discovery. of very, I think it's really something that can help society reach a next level. What I personally want to contribute it, and I think through my, say, art and science and tech

projects, I'd like to just help put it on the map more, particularly in field of education, like teaching kids about the importance of smell is, I think, a good starting point. So taking the art and so like we're going to do into schools and explaining kids about the importance of smell and then using their nose. Need a fun way, like playing memory games based on scent. There's a really cool series called The Drops of God, and it's about wine and something. It also speaks heavy about scent. The father trains his daughter from a very early age blindfold,

to sniff out different types of oranges and citrus, just so like it in water. So that's what I aim to do is, like, a hard tech and, like, the impact side. Notice it reminds me. I bought a house one time and my real estate agent could not smell, but I had never really been to the house. So when I got into the house, there was so much work that needed to be done because he didn't know there was a really bad smell. And it turns out there was like a lot of damage in the house. And like it cost us like tens of thousands of dollars that I would have known in advance. I could have had them fixed or I would have never even bought the home. but I didn't even know he couldn't so like is I never even thought that was like a thing

and then he's like oh sorry I don't I can't smell I didn't smell I didn't smell yeah no and and so like they did the flip side of things I mean that's that's of course like the way we don't do the way we as I say early humans the way we picked food or not was simply by by smelling it like no refrigerates and stuff so often just through the sniff test is has this meat gone off or not is the way we used to do it. But vice versa. So I think that's everything from sort of like a prevention set. I mean, if you flip it to the other side, like big companies like Nike, April from me, they're leveraging sense to drive sales in stores. Like there's Nike stores. I think Mike did tests where they had stores with like freshly cut grass and stores that didn't

have it. And if I remember the stats, Greg, I think the stores that had the fresh set sold about 20% more simply because it gives people a feeding of comfort. It's a different dimension to an experience. And I feel like every store, everywhere I go, the scent is really used in a lot of things. Even my wife, she had this spray. We keep going back to the store because she wants to smell this like spray like three days in a row.

She keeps going. I'm like, why do you keep going back? She's like, I really, really like this smell. and it's now like on our clothes like I can smell it you know on my shirt and it is fascinating so if somebody's watching this and they're like you know what like what is the what kind of industry you know like they always say this is a trillion dollar industry like how big is this industry I imagine it's pretty untapped because you're the first person that have 1,500 people that I've interviewed I've never heard anyone talk about this and the other thing is how do you see

can people use this like you're saying about sense and sales and stuff, how can somebody use this right now? I mean, there's it's, as you say, like in Paris, like it's grand trinity, it's building up like you see shower systems

shower manufacturers that are introducing systems or you have like water come up and it's paperizing scent to create like a home spa. There's efforts I think even by Sony I think is is developing

like a gaming or like a bit of hardware add-on for gaming. So I think industries are gradually catching up to the importance of smell in terms of creating experiences, not just in gaming or in wellness, but also in art. One of the curators for reading the museums in the New York, a museum also has olfactory art on the road art. So I think anything where you're consumer facing, and you want to basically better people's experiences somehow get sent to people.

But you see it in all the leading hotels in the world. Do they all that be small, so like tubes sticking out of the wall, whether then the dispense sent at certain points in the European age just to create different kinds of atmosphere. So it simply boosts the experience of tremendously. And there's been plenty of studies that showcase that if it's somehow engaged or part of the experience, that the recognition or the impact of these days, definitely higher. So how big is the industry?

Tough one. Like I haven't done any any estimates. I mean you're of course have all the big companies like Givodon, Fibonish and IFF. They're already heavily pushing pushing the young look. I don't know I need to do my match with hope I can see how big you can get. Well, I know you have an interesting childhood because your grandfather was an Austrian wood sculptor and you're storing church relics and you spent summers from what I've read chiseled like wood as a kid. It reminds me of like when I was a kid, I'd go with my dad to like a bookstore.

So now when I smell books, people think I'm crazy because I'm like when I smell a book, it actually makes me feel really calm because it reminds me of going to a bookstore with my dad because we always just went to a bookstore. So for you, like how does it, going through your, experience as a kid what influences you now or or what do you smell that reminds you of that time for me so to answer the second part like any any any wood kind of related sense for me sort of like brings me back to my grandfather's workshop because we were we spent so much time choosing different

kinds of wood and chopping and sawing and putting things together so would anything wood for me as has a it's i mean i have i have a one of my favorite perfumes here um it's the italian brand called the the merchant of venice they made his lovely gran of glass uh things and it's also quite a wood center so wood for me definitely does does that one and then how it sort of like shaped my my way of thinking is the seeing my grandpenter as an artisan like working with his hands is something that after spending time in in in the tech world where everything's right down above by computer i kind of loved so like the manual manual program i think now in my practice what i what i aim to pursue as well in the future is so like

combining those two like craftsmanship together with some kind of artisan artisanal work i would say so for the first collection i did around whiskey we uh actually started making these for like wooden wooden frames and and grand everything and inlaying and laying gold, 24-carat gold even to them. So I think if you're looking to sort of like where society is heading from a tech and the AI perspective, AI will be able to do a lot of rational things. And I think in like five to 10-15 year window, I think robots will also probably more of 1050 robots will also be able to do about the valuable stuff. So I think society will probably value everything that's really craft-driven in the short to midterm.

range. I mean, that's just like five sense. Yeah. So you've got, thinking about all this, you really got me thinking, like, I wonder with, there's a mental health crisis going on right now. I wonder if AI could understand, like you're saying, if you smell wood, it brings you back, it calms you down. I wonder if there's a way in the future where AI could then release whatever scent knowing how you feel. Like if you're anxious, you're depressed. And then it knows about what, like, whatever your profile, are and it releases them or like your you're like somebody passes away like your your husband or wife or partner passes away they always wore like the cologne that you showed and then that they

like sprays it in the air so then you smell it but um i imagine you tell people this they're just like you gave up everything before to focus on something that like nobody is doing and i think this is the great part about entrepreneurship is you pave sometime a path that has that no one's really thinking about but everyone kind of thinks you're crazy but then once you hit success then they're like you're a genius then you become the smartest person on the planet how like what are people saying to you when you tell them about this I mean it's there's a lot of things in there just like go back to your your two initial points definitely I mean it that you really get, you get it because I'm actually in touch with somebody from the NHS in the UK

about potentially putting this kind of work into hospitals. Because the lady that I work with, SISO, she's a legend in the, in a sense, simple factory space. And she basically, at some point she had a client who had a, I think, a traumatic relationship with a WAM. And exactly what you mentioned, CISO extracted said point of use from clothing. probably the one way, but basically, shortly up, she passed away, and turned that scent into a soap bar so that the person could actually, when she was taking a shower, as you say, she had this scent of her mom, being released in the shower, actually had like a calming effect. So I think there is definitely lots of areas where, as you say, it can be used for therapeutic

purposes. So, yeah, I hope to have one of my works. It's in UK hospitals, too, actually, as you say, is your health of your being. that being said it's I think it's Peter Diamani that always says like the day before something comes mainstream it's always it's always a crazy idea

and I think somewhere in the middle like what I had told my family or people in my families were like extended family a few years ago when I was rookie they were like they definitely didn't get it now that I'm indeed getting a bit of publicity and some visual and some visibility now it's sort of like

okay he's old to something but yeah it's I think it's part of the journeys you so like have this inner call because the funny thing is like I did not if you told me like a year ago that I would be working at the intersection of art and science and tech actually like no way I'm a tech guy I'm sticking to tech so finding myself here at each intersection and it's like in like a journey like something pulls you so I'm glad something's pulling me and we'll see where the road leads that's the beauty of entrepreneurship right like you you get the ability to go and do something crazy and go all in.

It might not work. It might work. We never really know up front. But that's the amazing part. That's the excitement. Everything could collapse tomorrow or everything could skyrocket to the moon. You know, like, we never, ever know. That's why that's the beauty that I love, even though it's like scary and exciting.

But I got to say, I'm just blown away. I can't wait. You got to come back at some point. because I want to hear more six months a year because technology moves so fast like set molecules and you're just talking about the soap and hospitals like I'm I before this conversation I wouldn't even think this is even possible but the fact in 25 minutes I've like my mind is like blown like this is amazing so uh you got to definitely fill us in if people want to follow along your journey because I think everybody needs to know this and everyone wants to know you know this

could be the future of our businesses. How can they do so? Thanks. Yeah, I mean, happy to come back and give an update. Yeah, my big downside is I'm not a social media person, so I literally created my Instagram a few, a few months ago. So I think LinkedIn is probably easiest to connect with me. And then I'll be posting actually some of the visual works on my Instagram. So at Sidartha Couti. But yeah, I think LinkedIn is easiest to connect. happy to be back in a few months and I would say a year and give some updates. So, Darth, this has been great. I mean, I'm like really excited for the Fedger.

It was really. It was a good. Thanks for putting this together. And we'll definitely be in touch soon.