👃  Stop and smell the community

👋  Good morning. Summer: very fun. Mosquito bites: not so fun. That’s why French startup Tornyol is building tiny AI-powered drones that hunt mosquitoes with ultrasonic sonar that identifies the unique frequency of their wingbeats before chopping them out of the sky. The drones, which weigh just 40 grams, can patrol areas of up to five acres and fly for three minutes at a time before returning to their charging stations. This would have come in handy during that backyard BBQ gone awry. 

NEWS FLASH 

🍊 Freshly squeezed: Israeli agtech startup Nanovel is developing AI-powered robots to harvest citrus fruit. The company, which is targeting a 2028 commercial launch, says the manual labor needed for fruit harvesting accounts for ~50% of production costs and a growing shortage of agricultural workers is squeezing the industry. Nanovel’s multi-armed robots use computer vision and AI to spot fruit hidden deep in tree canopies and pick lemons and oranges without damaging them.

👶 A Scotch tape to call their own: Drinking in bars, renting cars, smoking cigars, exclusive use of flimsy tape rolls… adults had it all. Except, tragically, that last one can no longer be lorded over the children of the world. 3M’s Scotch Brand launched a new line: Scotch Kids Tape, which is geared toward crafty youths ages 4+. How does it differ from its famed genericized tape, you wonder? It seemingly comes in a slightly more colorful package.

🧃 From the people who brought you Poppi and Goodles… comes a new powdered drink mix. Startup Fave raised a $1m seed round from Supernatural Ventures, backer of brands like Poppi, Goodles, and Siete Foods, to make better-for-you powdered beverages in a legacy product category that’s been slow to innovate.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Not-so-golden years: Americans estimate they’ll need $1.2m to retire comfortably, but only 30% think they’ll hit the million-dollar mark before retiring, according to a Schroders survey.
  
• Factory reset: Startup Realta Fusion is transforming a former Oscar Mayer factory into a fusion research facility, where it plans to generate its first plasma in 2029. 
  
• OK, sure: The mega-hyped first device from OpenAI will be a screenless smart speaker you can carry around your home, per Bloomberg. The AI companion will also have a camera, in a devastating blow to privacy advocates’ coronary health.
  
• How to raise $600m+? Combine AI and Big Pharma, obviously. Chai Discovery, maker of AI models used by Lilly, Novartis, and Pfizer to predict molecule interactions, closed its third huge funding round within a year. Can’t believe we didn’t think to do that first. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

Are businesses training their competition?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns they could be.

Nadella says that companies using proprietary AI models could be giving away valuable business information.

But what’s the solution for businesses?

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

Fragrance clubs are the new book clubs

Our five senses are the bridges that allow us to connect with each other. We do this by listening to music and watching sunsets together, hugging, sharing meals, etc.

Our sense of smell, however, despite being deeply tied to emotion and memory, has long been overlooked as a vehicle for social connection.

Now, fragrance clubs are changing that, turning what’s long been treated as a solo experience into a collective one.

Something’s in the air

They’ve been popping up everywhere from LA to Berlin to Shanghai, and take many forms: from casual blind-sniff meetups to organized tours, workshops, and fragrance swaps, or a little bit of everything.

• LA-based Reverie of Scent, founded in 2025, hosts picnic-esque BYO-perfume gatherings once a month, where “fragheads” discuss and swap scents, per The Los Angeles Times.
  
• Brooklyn-based fragrance brand Creature hosts ticketed “scent salons,” where raw materials from its all-natural perfumes are paired with natural wines.
  
• Ffern, a viral $129 subscription service with a 500k-person waitlist, is planning to introduce overnight events to showcase how its small-batch scents are made.
  
• Meanwhile, on college campuses, student-led fragrance clubs are getting academic with it, hosting workshops on the science behind perfumery, and infusing school spirit into custom-made scents.

Smells like community

Behind the trend are two things: a booming fragrance industry — perfume is the fastest-growing sector of the beauty industry, largely driven by smell-maxxing Gen Zers — and a lot of lonely people seeking in-person socialization.

Scent clubs address both, offering community and connection around a shared interest in a more laid-back, intentional way compared to usual nightlife activities.

• They’re similar to wine or book clubs, but with a lower barrier to entry (e.g., no assumed knowledge or required reading, and occasionally no cost), making them more welcoming of casual hobbyists and novices.
  
• Plus, the emphasis is typically on how a scent makes the smeller feel, not on how well they can identify its ingredients, which can produce more meaningful conversations about memory and taste, versus those centered around terroir or other insider jargon.

Not everyone can talk about soil composition or literary analysis for hours, but everyone’s got personal stories to share — which probably make for better conversations, anyway.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Looking for your best ad creative? Check your social media feeds. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Max acceptance rate among job applicants at Bending Spoons, the tech startup known for scooping up and overhauling old companies like AOL, Vimeo, and Evernote, per The Wall Street Journal. That makes scoring a job at the company, which hired just 286 of 800k job applicants last year, harder than getting into Harvard (acceptance rate: ~4%) or even becoming a NASA astronaut (0.1%).

Shoot for the stars? You might have better odds.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1945, the Manhattan Project successfully tested the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

🤬  Sure, why not: This website will call you names.

🔵  Game: Move those marbles.

👟  Lace up: Everything you could ever want to know about shoelaces.

🦊  Aww: A sleepy fox.

SHOWER THOUGHT

The happiest moments of your life likely occurred when you were too young to remember them.   SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Makes scents" Friedman.

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