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Live shopping in China is a massive, multi-billion-dollar market, but for years, American platforms have struggled to crack the format. But in 2019, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head started a live shopping marketplace for Funko Pops that not many investors believed in. Fast forward to today, Whatnot has transformed into a $11.5B valuation company, hitting 1 billion orders this year, overseeing transactions for everything from Pokémon cards to live seafood. It is now among the nation’s biggest shippers. Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle sits down with CEO Grant LaFontaine to talk about this unforeseen growth and the next steps for the company. 

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What if computers could smell?

For decades, scent remained computing’s final analog frontier. Now, Osmo has accomplished what many thought impossible: digitizing smell. By training AI to decode the relationship between molecular structures and human perception, Osmo has built the world’s first olfactory intelligence platform—transforming scent into searchable, programmable data. While poised to reshape the $30 billion flavor and fragrance industry, its implications extend far beyond perfume, opening new possibilities across health, food, technology, and human-computer interaction.

Can AI smell you? This startup built a $130 million digital nose

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Our mission is to give computers a sense of smell. For a century, we've been turning the world into data. Sight became pixels, sound became waveforms, but smell, the oldest sense no machine could digitize until now. For the first time ever, a teleported smell. With a single prompt, this startup says they can create a scent in just 48 hours. Completely reversing the model of how synth is designed and delivered a little bit fluffy, velvety. We see a lot of textures in perfumery too, but fragrance is just the beginning. The final frontier is using scent in the way that dogs can use scent to understand wellness or illness. This AI startup has raised $130 million to turn scent into data, perfume now, disease detection down the line. So what happens when you give a computer a nose? We're going to smell the whole world. For decades, 4 giants have dominated the $30 billion flavor and fragrance market. Now Ozmo's using AI to make it cheaper, faster, and more accessible. Neuroscientist Alex Wilschko created OSMO with a mission build the world's first olfactory intelligence, AI trained to predict what a molecule will smell like. What is OSO? Why did you create it? What we're trying to do is bring new, unique scents to more people in the world by removing the gates in the secrecy and frankly some of the arrogance that like, oh, only certain companies or only certain people can have a good scent. No, anybody can. We're democratizing scent. The idea of having shazam for smell, that you can walk into a room and just press a button and it just digitally can find the frequency of the music and match it to a correlated database, you should have that same feeling when you walk into a room and you smell a perfume or a cologne. You're like, what is that? Josh Wolf is a venture capitalist known for shaping cutting edge tech into real businesses. With a recently closed $1.5 billion fund, Lux Capital now commands more than $7 billion in assets. As one of the company's first outside investors, the firm helped raise $60 million for Ozmo's launch in 2023. How do you distinguish between what is scientifically possible and what is just hype? It's really sophisticated, hard. You need a PhD, and it comes down to three words. Does it work? If you're looking at something that is a hypothesis and you want to test it, then it's almost like a poker game, and you wanna ask how much capital accomplishes what in what period of time, and who will care. The bet is paying off. Osmo signed clients from indie brands to multinational CPGs. The company has authenticated sneakers by smell. All you have to do is get the shoebox close to the sensor, reduced animal testing, and received millions in funding from the Gates Foundation to support AI enabled insect control, altogether raising $130 million in just 4 years. How do you prove though that it's not just evocative, but it's also really a business? In our case right now, you just smell the results. I smell anxiety and 234 years of American capitalism. We took Osmo's tech to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to see if a machine could actually capture the smell of ambition. To bottle a place like this, Osmo had to teach a machine to turn scent into numbers. What does it actually mean to collect data for scent? One is like you have to make or acquire an actual physical smell, and then you have to turn that physical smell into ones and zeros. The breakthrough came from an unlikely place, the AI built to discover new drugs. They figured out how to teach AI to deal with inputs that aren't shaped like a rectangle. So images are rectangles, they're grids of pixels. Text is a very long, thin rectangle, but molecules are atoms that click together in all kinds of different shapes. They're very much not a grid. And so there was a set of techniques developed to deal with that kind of input called graph neural networks. In 2024, Osmo captured the smell of a real plum, encoding it as data and rebuilding it across the lab. No human involved. We put that prompt of like give me the smell of the New York Stock Exchange into Osmo Studio, and Osmo Studio is able to take really anything like text and image and convert it into scent. What does the New York Stock Exchange smell like? So the first one is woody, floral, earthy. Well, it smells a lot better than the New York Stock Exchange, which is frankly a little bit of a sweatier place. But it does actually smell like the digital quality of it. Yeah, well, let me give you this direction and see what you think of this. That to me smells like the New York Stock Exchange. Did we get it? Yes, that to me smells like the New York Stock Exchange. This feels like a marble lobby where a musky warmth settles on polished stone. I can't stop smelling. At what point, if any, was there a human touch in this process? At the very beginning when you and I actually designed this, we're using a tool, we're using Osmo Studio to create scent, but like that's like using Canva or Photoshop or Figma. Like we were the designers. The brands behind most perfume, shampoo, and detergent don't formulate their own scents. They buy them from suppliers. That's the enterprise business Ozmo is disrupting, the platform layer behind scent. Now, to what extent is Osmo revenue generating? What parts are in research? For the first, I would say 2.5 years. Everything was R&D because what we were staring at had so much scientific risk and after we teleported to scent, we realized we've actually taken a lot of that scientific risk off the table and so we're a hybrid like we're highly technical, but the fastest growing part of our company is in manufacturing and in sales and we. finished fragrance to emerging brands that are growing super fast, but we also sell the software capabilities and access to our data for really large companies that also trade in smell. So we have a few different facets of our business, but they all are involved in making great fragrances for brands. The big suppliers often take months, with many requiring bulk orders. Ozmo, on the other hand, serves smaller brands, a market historically underserved. You could have done this as a B2C business, but you chose B2B specifically. Why? One thing I've noticed in B2C, you can be successful as a brand with an amazing story. And having amazing technology and science behind that can help, but it might not be the single reason why you win. And I wanted to set us up in a business where we're kind of dragged into the future where we keep developing our technology, keep developing our research to achieve even greater ambitions and getting better at the core science of scent and unraveling the mystery of scent to actually be good for the business. Who are your competitors? Who do you look at and say they're also marching towards the same mountain? I don't think there's anybody out there that's as weird as we are. I mean, there's companies that design and manufacture scent for sure. They've been around for hundreds of years. We're doing it very differently, right? So instead of it being a very gate kept process, we actually show our formulas to people. Traditionally, chemists test one molecule at a time. Osmo meanwhile says they use AI to screen billions at once, selecting only the best candidates to develop. The company says its success rates are 10 times higher and that it's 5 times cheaper compared to industry norms. Osmo also says it published more new fragrance ingredient patents than the rest of the industry combined in 2025. Where a traditional patent might cover one or two molecules, Osmo's patents can include up to 250, and they hope that scale means more profitability. What do you consider the moat for something like? Some of it is the data and then being able to be the only company that can predictably produce something with mathematical rigor every single time. We want it just like somebody was tuning a guitar. We want it to be a little bit more pungent or a little bit spikier. We want it to last for longer and Alex can basically say, OK, we're going to add this to this and we're going to be able to do it and we'll be able to do it every single time reproducibly and predictably. While AI expedites molecule discovery, humans are the artists who help craft them into a final scent. So this, this is a mini experimental robot. It can work day and night and can do a lot of samples because AI needs a lot of data, needs a lot of how do you make an apple, how do you make fresh, how do you make more. We have a lot of these, yes, because they're very helpful. Its name is Taylor Swift. That's it. Every robot here has a name. Christophe Laudemil, one of the few master perfumers in the world, leads Osmo's AI human collaboration. We know the AI is going to come and people are working on it, but what happens for us, I think as a perfumer to get into AI and now to steer it as well. It's not all AI, it's not all human. It's this beautiful blend of like creativity being unleashed in new ways that's enabled by the technology that we've created. But fragrance isn't the endgame. Ozma says it's building towards something bigger, a tool that could one day help detect disease. The final frontier is using scent in the way that dogs can use scent to understand wellness or illness. It's insanely hard. Dogs have been trained, who have sharper senses of smell than we do, to detect COVID, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. And so every one of those diseases has a signature. For Osmo, fragrance is the commercial work paying for that longer term research. And the reason is we have to fund ourselves in order to do that, and the act of making fragrances actually generates data and understanding, which is strengthening our platform to make even more ambitious bets in the future. For Alex, that motivation is personal. His father died of brain cancer, a condition that some evidence suggests has a unique scent. What we need to uncover is perhaps those are also the same molecules in someone who has brain cancer like my father had. If you have a disease that's developing, there's going to be something that's going to change about the scents that are leaving your body, and nobody knows the details of what that is, but we know that dogs can detect it. And so what OSMO is is an organization, a group of people designed to unravel these mysteries kind of one by one. In a way that is responsible and resilient and designed to last over time.

Agentic AI has officially graduated from basic decision trees to unscripted autonomous agents, turning customer service into a massive $15 billion market. Startups like Decagon AI are pulling in a $4.5B valuation because of high enterprise demand. Hertz is already routing 50% of its phone interactions through AI voice, dropping its per-call costs by more than half. And the car rental giant is hardly alone. Companies are fast adopting AI customer service agents. However, about 80% of consumers still crave a human on the other line, and 40% of us would literally pay a premium just to bypass the bot. Fortune’s AI Editor Jeremy Kahn takes us behind the scenes to break down the delicate balance between instant resolutions and human connection.

Almost 80% of Americans Prefer Human Agents, but Why Is AI Growing in Customer Service?

AI is making customer service even more unbearable. Three second delay and it goes ha ha ha, and I couldn't talk to a representative. How often does someone come in and they're just like, 000 agent agent agent. In 2026, AI and autonomous agents have taken over customer service. A recent report says 88% of contact centers are now leveraging AI, with a quarter of them running on fully integrated automation. Most of the inquiries that happened today in five years, there's no question that AI. will be able to handle all of them, but there's a catch. Another study reveals that nearly 80% of Americans still prefer talking to a living, breathing human being. And the hidden costs of this automation, it's staggering. Research shows that simply disclosing a chatbot's identity before a chat even begins can plummet purchase conversion rates by 80%. There's always that little human touch that that we always need. Yet we're a generation obsessed with instant gratification. How do we square that? As the AI editor at Fortune, I focus on how AI is shaping business and the wider economy. With AI poised to transform customer experience, I wanted to talk with business leaders on the front lines of this shift to find out how they're adapting and what the future of business really looks like. Despite our collective craving for human connection, the AI customer service market has ballooned to over $15 billion in 2026. So agentic AI or AI systems that actually take actions in the world, whereas previously you had automated agents that had to follow a set decision tree. With the current systems, they actually are able to have much less structured flows of how they operate. One of the front runners leading the charge is Decagon AI. Founded in 2024, they've already hauled in $481 million in funding, commanding a $4.5 billion post-money valuation. That is a major indicator of just how eager enterprises are to adopt this tech. Decagon's mission building faster, smarter AI without damaging the customer experience, and it's working. They're maintaining a 93% customer satisfaction score while driving revenue from fully automated interactions with. Some individual contracts now clearing $1 million. What do you think that looks like going forward in, in 5 years? Most of the inquiries that happened today, I would say in 5 years there's no question that an AI agent will be able to handle all of them. In a lot of these mass, like huge volume use cases, the human touch doesn't really matter, right? It's, it's not like you need the human touch to book a new flight or to, you know, reorder a lost credit card. All you want in that situation is just like get it done. It's, it's a little bit more mundane. These are not canned responses. This is something way more personalized. It's very different from what you've tried before. You're kind of changing the customer's behavior. But get this, over 40% of consumers say they'd actually pay a premium just to guarantee they can speak to a real human representative. Around the time of the industrial revolution, people wanted to buy a Ford Model T because the presumption was the quality was higher because it was built in a factory. Now today, curated, handmade experiences. Seem to have more of a premium association with them. Look across the industry and you'll see giants leveraging AI in different ways. Take Chipotle, a behemoth with over 100,000 employees, while some, like Decagon, are adapting to customers' changing behavior, others are doubling down on the interpersonal interaction. What kind of customer experience do you really want people to have going forward? One of the things that I think sets us apart and makes us special is the human interaction. Hi, how are you? Those curated moments of human connection and service. Are always going to be a fundamental part of what the Chipotle experience is. Back in 2024, they automated their hiring process with an administrative AI system called Avocado. And what was the idea behind that AI system? The average restaurant manager was spending more than 10 hours a week on recruiting activity, 20% of their week just on that one task. It's a fraction of that now. And how has AI changed sort of what your daily routine looks like? It allows me to, you know, be in front with the guest, serve them, going over recipe cards, you know, tasting food, a lot of training, people development for Chipotle, you know, we always need that human touch, you know, we always need, uh, people tasting the food because that's what we sell at the end of the day. We definitely always gonna need that human aspect. I don't know what kind of day they might be having before they come here, you know, we give them a burrito, a bowl, you know, we serve them with gratitude, with a smile, you know. Thank you. That could make anybody's day. But to see the customer facing side of this revolution, I synced up with Hertz. As an international car rental giant, they handle massive call volumes. By deploying Decagon's tech since early 2025, they're now resolving 75% of customer inquiries autonomously. We want to take every single one of those calls that comes our way, and we want that to be as seamless for our customers as possible. To see this AI agent interaction, I tried giving Hertz's AI, Haley, a call. Hi, this is Haley. I see you have a rental scheduled for pickup. How can I help you today? Oh hey Hayley, I'd like to change the drop off location. Let me see, where would you like to drop off the car instead? Yeah, if I could drop it off at LaGuardia Airport, is that possible? Great, you're all set with the new drop off at LaGuardia. Yeah, that was pretty good. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's was smooth, and it definitely didn't have to wait, which is nice not to have to queue at all. That's the new expectation. They're going to expect faster. Response times, better experiences. When we look at the future of contact centers, we're gonna see more and more AI agents taking on this workload. Every business will have an AI agent that's kind of like the front door to me that actually isn't to say that the human agents will go away because there's gonna be a lot more things that can be handled. Like why are people doing more of the mundane conversations because they have to, um, like those are the bread and butter. But if the AI can take that away, it frees them up to do more conversations that are not being had today. In fact, Hertz told us that AI voice is now live across 50% of their total phone interactions. In 2026, the cost of a customer interaction dropped by more than half to under $1.50. That shift means companies like Hertz are now seeing roughly $3.5 back for every $1 they put into AI customer service. Yet, depending on the issue, Hertz still reroutes calls to human agents. Hi, this is Hayley. How can I help you today? Hi, Haley, I've got a Hertz rental car right now and I have a flat tire. I'll connect you to a live agent now. Thanks for your patience. Thank you. They've got a flat tire or maybe they're on the side of the road and they're at risk. They absolutely want to hear a human voice and have that level of connection where someone understands that they may be at risk and is doing everything they can to support them in that scenario. Earlier you mentioned that billing is an area that still reverts to the human agent. Why is that? Why, why is the billing so important to be handled by a human? Yes, we think that the billing conversation is one about trust and the customers looking to understand why maybe a charge is not what they believe. It should be. So that's one where we very much default to someone being able to explain those pieces to them, and we found customers much prefer that. But even with those undeniable margins, the trust gap persists. Studies show that only 13% of consumers completely trust AI. Generally speaking, people will say I would be a little bit nervous about that, or in some cases a lot nervous or being very careful to consider PII or other information that might be in those systems and make sure that the models are both protected and secure from that perspective. that were responsibly handling people's information. How do you make sure there aren't hallucinations, because there have been these cases, I mean this famous Air Canada case where the judge said Air Canada was sort of liable for that incorrect information that its AI system had provided as part of a customer support experience. The only way to prevent that in a nondeterministic system is to have all these checks around. We call them supervisor models, and you kind of think of it as like the main agent is executing and you have these like, you know, small models around it that are running in parallel. There's all these models around it to make sure it stays on track and stays within the guard rails. Data proves we want more human interaction and will actively penalize businesses that deprive us of it. But as agentic AI gets increasingly good, will that sentiment hold? Are we staring at a future where consumers are forced to choose between instant resolutions or the human touch? Is there anything you think AI agents? We never really be able to automate when it comes to the customer contact, honestly, no, I think at a certain point it's almost indistinguishable. You'll get into a situation where if you didn't tell, inform the user that you might not know, consumers will now learn the other side, which they're, they're now used to interacting with great AI agents that they'll be disappointed if they're waiting on hold. We have very high conviction that that's where, where the world is moving towards.

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