Our Mission
We started in 2019 in London with a goal to digitise the human sense of smell. The way we perceive molecules around is an incredibly advanced human ability which still remains off-limits for instruments and algorithms. We as humans can detect dangerous gases, contaminated food and chemical hazards at absolutely tiny quantities, which remains hard to achieve even with the most advanced lab detection equipment.
On the flipside there are cases when human lives, product waste and CO2 emissions could be saved if we had an ability to detect molecules digitally where humans lack the training and the ability. For example dogs have been shown to be able to detect early signs of cancer at 99% accuracy.
Our goal is to digitize the realm of molecules and smells and enable easy to use applications in quality control and human health. The unlocking of this frontier requires near continuous monitoring instrumentation, large datasets and clever algorithms.
Our mission as a company today is to build and combine smart devices with world-class AI algorithms to enable instant insights into the chemical composition of products, ingredients and materials around us, ultimately bridging the gap between how our brain perceives molecular traces and how machines detect them.
If we succeed, the world will be a safer place where food contamination can be instantly checked, identification of dangerous molecules in the air and water screened on the go and manufacturing processes optimised to cut out waste and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Ultimately the detection of biomarkers and diseases in humans can be digitized.
About us
At Volatile AI we have been conducting research into gas and volatile organic compound detection and fingerprinting (volatilomics / volatolomics) since our inception in 2019. We work both in the instrumentation and data analytics / artificial intelligence applications towards VOC fingerprinting. Over our existence we have developed two instruments: Scout2, an electronic nose, combining up to 15 gas sensors, and recently Scout3, which combines an electronic nose sensor array with lab grade sample preparation methods, including a gas chromatography column. Scout3 is a modular system, which allows for easy detector plug and play and can be widely customized.
Volatile have previously received investments from UK and US venture capital funds, have participated in various accelerators, such as Plug and Play Silicon Valley, MassChallenge Switzerland, HAX China and CERN Lithuania and others. The company actively participates in research both with the academia and private sector and have conducted projects with companies such as Lavazza and researchers such as SINTEF and NIBIO for volatile organic compound fingerprinting.