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

09 Feb 2026

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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.

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

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet

Other episodes from Founder's Story

The Truth About Founder Wealth | Ep 302 with Julian Metcalfe Founder of Pret a Manger and itsu

Why Applying for Jobs Is a Waste of Time (And What Actually Works Instead) | Ep 301 with Julia Arpag Founder of Aligned Recruitment

The Testosterone Myth That’s Costing Men Years of Their Lives | Ep 299 with Shalin Shah CEO of Marius Pharmaceuticals

The Founder Who Turns Your Body Heat Into Healing Light: 'It Goes 2 Inches Deep' | Ep 295 with Seth Casden Founder of Hologenix

Side Hustle With a Heart: How One Founder Makes Giving Frictionless | Ep 289 with Stuart White Founder of We Are Our World

He Found $500B Hidden in Healthcare Waste — And Built the AI to Fix It | Ep 283 with Raheel Retiwalla Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Boost Health AI

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