Twenty years of insect research, now on a chip
Scentian Bio has spent the better part of two decades studying how insects smell. Now it wants to sell that capability as a product.
The company, spun out of Plant & Food Research, has built what it calls a bio-electronic nose platform. It takes insect olfactory receptor proteins, synthesises them in a lab, and places them on electronic sensor devices to detect volatile organic compounds in food, air, liquids, and human breath. The sensitivity is staggering: femtomolar-level detection, equivalent to finding one water droplet in 20,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That outperforms both the human nose and the gas chromatography machines that currently dominate laboratory analysis.
Founder and CTO Dr Andrew Králíček spent nearly 20 years at Plant & Food Research before commercialising the technology. His description is characteristically direct: “It’s the final frontier for sensor development. We want to take insect smell receptor proteins and put them into the electronics; combine the biology with the nanotechnology.”
CEO Jonathan Good frames it in commercial terms: “a digital sense of smell and taste, making an electronic nose on a chip.”
The money trail says the science is real
The company has just closed a $7 million raise, its largest to date. But the investor roster across all rounds tells a more interesting story than the headline number.
Finistere Ventures, a specialist agri-food tech fund, and Toyota Ventures led the $2.1 million seed round, with Icehouse Ventures and global crowdfunding platform OurCrowd participating. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation contributed US$1.7 million specifically for disease detection research. Booster Innovation Fund took a position worth $200,000 in August 2023. Sprout Agritech came in earlier with $1 million, three-quarters of which came from Callaghan Innovation.
That breadth, spanning NZ venture capital, global agritech funds, a Japanese industrial giant’s venture arm, and one of the world’s largest philanthropic organisations, is unusual for a New Zealand spinout at this stage. It suggests multiple sophisticated investors have independently validated the technology.
Kiwifruit is the proving ground
The nearest-term revenue sits in food quality control. Scentian Bio is running a pilot with Zespri, the world’s largest kiwifruit marketer, backed by Zespri’s $2 million annual Innovation Fund.
The business case is tangible. Current harvest timing methods, Brix sugar testing and dry matter analysis, are slow and give incomplete maturity data. VOC measurement identifies key compounds across the maturation process in real time. As Good puts it: “If you can optimise the harvest timing, you can make sure that there is more fruit at higher grades, which store better and last longer.”
Zespri works with over 4,000 growers worldwide. If the pilot succeeds, the deployment footprint is significant. And according to BusinessDesk, the world’s food giants are already knocking on Scentian Bio’s door.
Food is the entry point, not the ceiling
The same VOC detection platform extends well beyond fruit. The Gates Foundation funded Scentian Bio to develop non-invasive, real-time early detection for diseases including tuberculosis, cancer and COVID-19 via volatile biomarkers in breath or on skin. That is a global multi-billion dollar diagnostics market.
Biosecurity is another natural fit. NZ Post’s new $250 million Auckland Processing Centre already uses 3D scanning described as a “game-changer” for biosecurity and drug detection, but chemical VOC sensing complements imaging in ways that physical scanning cannot replicate.
The government’s own innovation strategy is aligned. MBIE’s November 2025 update committed $231 million to the NZ Institute for Advanced Technology and projected AI could add $76 billion to GDP by 2038. Scentian Bio sits squarely at the intersection of AI and advanced sensing.
The gap between lab and factory floor
Here is the honest part. The seed round announcement cited a food quality product launch by end of 2024. The $7 million raise in 2025 suggests that target slipped, or the company decided it needed more capital before going to market.
Neither scenario is unusual in deep tech. But the gap between lab-proven femtomolar sensitivity and a ruggedised, cost-competitive, field-deployable product manufactured at scale is precisely where biosensor companies globally have stumbled. The Zespri pilot is encouraging. It is still a pilot.
The question for business readers is not whether the science works. The investor roster answers that. It is whether New Zealand’s capital markets can sustain a company like this through the long commercialisation runway that deep tech demands, or whether the next raise happens offshore, and the value creation with it.
Sources
- AgFunder News: Scentian Bio raises $2.1m seed round to build biosensors inspired by bugs
- AgFunder News: Scentian Bio deploys AI-powered biosensor tech in trial with Zespri
- NZ Entrepreneur: Scentian Bio funding to speed up disease detection via an electronic nose
- NZ Tech Podcast: Real-time chemical sensing with Scentian Bio
- BusinessDesk: World’s food giants knocking on Scentian Bio’s door
- NZX: BIF acquires shares in Scentian Bio
- Agroempresario: Scentian Bio revolutionizes kiwifruit harvest with AI and insect-sensor tech
- MBIE: Going for Growth – Innovation, Technology and Science update November 2025
- 1News: New tech a game-changer at mega NZ Post processing facility