Osmo, a startup backed by Lux Capital and Google Ventures, has opened a new dedicated production site and headquarters at 585 Kapkowski Road in Elizabeth. — Photos by Alexander Severin / Courtesy: KSS Architects
By Marlaina Cockcroft
If it wasn’t true before, a new manufacturing and research facility in Elizabeth has only bolstered the case of anyone who sees New Jersey as “Silicon Valley for the fragrance industry.”
At least, that’s how Mateusz Brzuchacz described the state in mid-May as Osmo, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to create custom scents, unveiled the cutting-edge headquarters and production hub. The facility is now up and running at 585 Kapkowski Road, filling a nearly 60,000-square-foot industrial building near Port Newark-Elizabeth with a tenant that is both nontraditional and hoping to grow in a market that is already home to several other major fragrance houses.
And it all followed an exhaustive but fast-paced search and a painstaking design and buildout of the company’s highly specialized infrastructure.
“If you look at the fragrance design process and those [other] companies, it takes weeks to develop,” Brzuchacz, Osmo’s chief manufacturing officer, said during the May 12 ribbon cutting. “We can build a fragrance in a matter of hours … that’s the change that we are striving for.”
The so-called digital scent company, which is leasing the space from Kurv Industrial and Elberon Development Group, spun out of Google’s AI division in 2022 with founder and olfactory neuroscientist Alex Wiltschko at the helm. It now serves large corporate customers and smaller ones through a product called Studio, which lets anyone create their own fragrance, with more interfaces and services in the works as it scales the business.
The venture began searching for a new location in January 2025 after outgrowing space in New York’s Alexandria Center for Life Science. With the help of brokers from Newmark’s Rutherford office, Osmo toured roughly 20 buildings in northern New Jersey before signing the lease at 585 Kapkowski Road last June.
According to Newmark’s Chris Koeck, the site won out because of its proximity to New York and because the property, part of a new four-building complex near Port Newark-Elizabeth and the Mills at Jersey Gardens, had the necessary zoning for manufacturing use.
“That’s what separated Elizabeth from the others,” said Koeck, a managing director at the firm.
Newmark also handled project management, working with KSS Architects, while Rock Brook designed the mechanical, electrical and IT infrastructure for a highly technical space that includes robotic equipment to create and manufacture fragrances.
“We translated Osmo’s program requirements into the infrastructure that’s necessary to support their mission,” said Michael Purzycki, a director at Monroe-based Rock Brook.
Greg DeMarco, the engineering firm’s CEO, added: “What’s incredibly important, especially for a fragrance facility, is the ventilation, the mechanical systems and the exhaust systems,” which have to be designed properly to support both positive and negative pressures and air changes.
In addition, said Michael Kuzmuk, a senior managing director at Newmark, there were power requirements. The machine for the robot room, “the conveyor belt of everything magical to make fragrance,” is made by one company worldwide in limited quantity, which drove the schedule for the project. Princeton-based KSS handled the design, but Rock Brook did a lot of juggling to make sure the robot was operational on day one, Kuzmuk said.
“The robot is really the heart of their formulation process, where they could feed in a recipe or a thought and the robot will create a formulation in minutes, whereas ordinarily it would take a compounder days to put something together,” Purzycki said.
Osmo — which has 110 employees, most of whom work on site — said the building has a combination of warehouse and office space and features natural light, furniture in neutral shades of beige and gray and greenery in the open main room. Smelling stations with glass cloches offer samples of Osmo’s scents, like Vento, in collaboration with Art Basel in Miami, and Electric Harmony, created for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.
Wiltschko, the founder, said some scents are entirely craft-made while others come from its Olfactory Intelligence technology, but most are a blend of the two. “We view [OI] as a tool.”
He sees his company, which is backed by Lux Capital, Google Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures, as on a mission to digitize smell. During the grand opening, he said, “What we’re doing effectively is decoding or understanding our oldest sense,” one of the most powerful and the least understood.
A smell can unlock a memory, uplift someone’s mood or offer a clue to medical issues, Wiltschko said. “Being able to tap into that and read and write that sense is super profound and it’s worth working on.”
Wiltschko said when Osmo launched, the data it wanted wasn’t available, so it will use this facility to gather its own.
“We can create a new scent every 100 seconds on the robot that’s in the other room,” Wiltschko said, noting separately that AI, manufacturing and creativity together “creates a flywheel, where every time we create a scent, we store data but we also store insights, and every time we serve a customer, we learn. So we’re building this compounded system that helps us learn and improve constantly over time.”
The building, which has enough desk space to double the company and warehouse space to expand into, was necessary for what Osmo is doing, Wiltschko said. He added that newer companies “haven’t had the industrial capacity to make a lot of smells. … If we want to be serious about digitizing scent, we need to produce a lot of data, and that means make a lot of scents and then analyze those, and that really requires a physical infrastructure like this.”
Multiple major fragrance houses have facilities in New Jersey, including Givaudan, International Flavors & Fragrances, Takasago and Mane. Another company, OnScent in Hackensack, announced in 2025 it would use AI for predictive insights on fragrances.
Osmo will work with local partners for filling, secondary packaging and logistics. As of February, it has raised $130 million in capital.
Visiting dignitaries offered praise for Osmo’s plans.
“This is a company working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, chemistry, molecular data, manufacturing and human artistry,” said Kellie Doucette, New Jersey’s first chief operating officer. “That’s not easy work. That’s highly technical, it’s creative and it reflects where so much of the modern economy is headed.”
Elizabeth Mayor J. Christian Bollwage pointed out the property they stood on was once landfill, then remediated to generate power and electricity for Jersey Gardens before the warehouses were built.
“We are bringing the future growth of our city with more people working here and coming here,” Bollwage said.
Kuzmuk, of Newmark, said the different groups involved cooperated well to complete the project quickly. “The cradle-to-grave timeline here is something remarkable.”
For the record
JLL’s Chris Hile and Doug Rodenstein represented the developers and landlords, Kurv Industrial and Elberon Development Group, in Osmo’s 58,488-square-foot lease at 585 Kapkowski Road in Elizabeth. Newmark’s Brian Waterman, David Waterman, Al Petrillo, Christopher Koeck and Zach Brenner represented the tenant.
Newmark’s Michael Kuzmuk provided project management, while Rock Brook spearheaded the engineering design for mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection as well as information technology and security design. KSS Architects’ Scot Murdoch, Jennie Himler, Colleen Grogan Bajda, Mariela Hernandez and Shelby Ulrich designed the space.
“Osmo’s innovative work of translating one of our most human senses into a digital language demands a space as ambitious as the company itself,” said Murdoch, a partner with KSS. “Our design draws directly from the science of scent, using ideas of concentration, mixing, and dissipation to shape how people gather and move through the space.”
