Jonathan Good: making sense of the world

A dog is probably what comes to mind when we think of a creature with a supercharged sense of smell. But insects also have this superpower and their receptors’ sensitivity to microscopic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) – to forage for food, avoid predators and find mates – is 1,000 times greater than a dog’s.

Mimicking this super-smelling ability is what Auckland-based company Scentian Bio is doing, with its creation of an AI-powered ‘digital nose’. By mounting synthetic insect scent receptors on microchips, the company aims to provide low cost, handheld sensors that can quickly assess and monitor VOCs across a range of applications, from food quality and disease detection to biosecurity.

“Smell is our fastest, most foundational sense,” says Scentian Bio’s CEO, alumnus Jonathan Good. “It’s the only one wired directly into our limbic system to alert us to danger, changes and disease. So there’s a huge breadth of contexts in which having that sense could transform how we work.”

The company’s unique biological approach mimics nature’s highly evolved scent receptors, allowing AI to interpret signals with a level of sensitivity and precision that standard electronic noses simply can’t match, says Jonathan. The initial target market for this technology is the global US$8 billion food and beverage quality control industry, with commercial pilot projects now nearing completion with seven global food firms.

“They all have the same fundamental problem: people want more natural ingredients, but nature is inherently variable,” explains Jonathan.

“Companies receive truck after truck of raw ingredients, but they don’t know the quality, so they’re sending millions of samples to labs. That’s not only hugely expensive, but the information can take days to come back, which is not good for perishable food. That’s why the world is full of write-offs and recalls, because the information speed doesn’t match the supply chain.”  

The company’s sensors can deliver chemical information in real time, he says, allowing decisions to be made immediately rather than days later.

Early results and the technology’s promise have attracted strong investor support, with the company closing an oversubscribed $7 million funding round in April, led by Icehouse Ventures. The investment will help scale manufacturing in New Zealand, expand engineering and customer support teams, and continue developing applications in medical diagnostics and biosecurity.

The technology’s potential for many applications is one of the reasons Icehouse Ventures backed the company, says Icehouse principal Bex Gidall. It’s also difficult to replicate, is attracting significant global customer interest, and has potential “to deliver laboratory-quality accuracy in minutes, even in complex real-world samples rather than just controlled laboratory conditions”, says Bex.

The beginnings

Jonathan says leading the start-up feels like a natural culmination of his skills and experiences – drawing on everything from his successful exit from a previous start-up to handling a botulism crisis at Fonterra.

A common thread throughout his career has been a fascination with how things work.

“I’ve always been curious about the world and loved problem solving, which I guess was the driving force for studying physics and maths,” he says. “Then I realised studying economics added a whole different level to that.”

After graduating from the University of Auckland with a conjoint Bachelor of Science and Arts (Hons) degree, Jonathan joined McKinsey & Company in Auckland before heading to the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His Oxford masters thesis, ‘The incentive for a dominant firm to innovate’, earned him the prize for the best overall performance by a graduate economics student in 2006. But academia wasn’t where he saw his future.

Itching to get back to business, he returned to McKinsey, this time in New York, where he specialised in technology, media and telecommunications.

“I mostly loved it, but there was always that frustration of being the consultant and not the person who’s actually implementing and delivering outcomes.” 

That frustration pushed him and two friends to move to San Franciso to start their own venture. Called 1000memories, it was a tech platform that helped people preserve, organise and share family photographs and stories.

“We had a list of what we thought were really good ideas and what became 1000memories was towards the top of that list, but it wasn’t the thing that we quit our jobs thinking we’d do; we were just bold enough to give it a shot.”

Backed by start-up accelerator Y Combinator, the trio successfully secured venture capital funding before the company was acquired and its tech absorbed by the genealogy company Ancestry.com.

On the scent

Wanting to return to Auckland, but unsure of what to do next, Jonathan accepted an offer from Fonterra to “bring some entrepreneurial thinking” into the organisation, resulting in him leading its $400 million retail business. Stints at T&G Global (Turners & Growers), Transpower and Auckland Airport followed.

However, the start-up itch persisted, leading him to become a mentor at Sprout Agritech, which helps accelerate growth and investment in early-stage agritech and food-tech companies. It was during a Sprout pitch session that Jonathan met Dr Andrew Králíček, the founder of Scentian Bio.

Head of molecular sensing at Plant & Food Research (now part of the Bioeconomy Science Institute), Andrew had spent two decades working out how to harness insects’ sense of smell to create highly sensitive synthetic biosensors. In 2019, when Andrew met the Sprout team, he’d just filed patents capturing the technology he’d developed.

“From that first pitch, it just joined a whole series of different dots in my mind,” recalls Jonathan. “The tech was amazing, especially in terms of building something that can really change how everyone on the planet experiences life.”

Initially as a mentor, then board member, Jonathan helped spin the company out from Plant & Food and raise $3.5 million in seed funding, plus $2.7 million from the Gates Foundation to accelerate breath-based malaria detection. In 2023, he became the company’s full-time CEO to help accelerate its transition from research to commercialisation.

Building that capability has highlighted the depth of talent in New Zealand, says Jonathan.

“We have quite a few University of Auckland alumni on the team. We’re doing something very specific and multidisciplinary, so it’s great to be able to recruit amazing, world-class talent in Auckland.”

His focus is now on building supply reliability and manufacturing capability as the company transitions to regular commercial shipments – first to the companies involved in the pilots and then further afield – which should happen by the end of this year, he says.

But monitoring food quality is just the beginning. Imagine a smartwatch that, equipped with Scentian’s technology, analyses your sweat for nutritional health or early signs of disease, says Jonathan.

“We see the opportunity as vastly different to the scale we have now. Look at what’s happening with AI in robotics – all these things would be enhanced by real-time chemical information.

“We look at ourselves ultimately as a chip company. We want to provide smell chips in the same way other people sell LiDAR cameras or Nvidia sells GPUs, enabling other people to build the applications. The possibilities are very exciting.”