Fragnatique's Startup Story, as Told to Tehnopol

On 5 October 2026, Tehnopol published the story of Fragnatique in its Startup Stories series, the profiles it writes on the teams inside its accelerator programmes. Fragnatique is a perfume advisor built by Appthos Studio OÜ in Tallinn: it draws a personal scent map of a person's taste and matches them to fragrances with the reason written out. The interview covers how the idea started, the evening it was proven, why we chose the Tehnopol Startup Accelerator, and where the company is going. This is our account of that conversation, with the original linked at the end.

Where did the idea for Fragnatique come from?

It started with a habit, not a business plan. Long before Fragnatique existed, Ömer Kadir Kurt bought a new bottle almost every month and spent the weeks in between reading note lists and imagining how they would smell. Some of those blind buys went badly, and that, he says, only made the search more interesting.

The idea itself arrived at a table. A group of friends with the same obsession had each brought a few favourite bottles, and someone noticed that not one of those favourites had been found by chance. A tester tried on a whim, a friend who insisted, a compliment from a stranger: every bottle had arrived with a persuader.

None of us had discovered our favourites entirely by chance. There had always been something, or someone, pointing us towards them.

The founders, in Tehnopol's startup story

If love for a scent always needs a persuader, a well-built system can learn to be an honest one. Music and film already work this way: a streaming service learns what you listen to and introduces you to songs you have never heard. Fragrance, the most personal of the senses, was still chosen on a guess. That gap is where Fragnatique began.

How did Fragnatique know it was working?

The harder part came after the idea. We understood the problem because we had lived it, but there was no well-worn path for solving it, and for a long time the open question was an uncomfortable one: was this a big problem, or did it only feel big because it was ours?

The answer came at an international mobile app event in Türkiye. People who had never heard of Fragnatique described their preferences, scrolled through their matches, and started spotting perfumes they already owned and loved. The same question came back from one visitor after another: "How did it know?"

From that point the product no longer needed explaining; people were finding its value on their own. Tehnopol's selection, one of nine startups chosen from 97 applications, confirmed the direction from outside the team.

What makes Fragnatique different?

Most tools in fragrance begin with a catalogue question: what exists? Fragnatique begins with a different one: which fragrance is right for this person, and why?

A perfume can read perfectly on paper and be wrong on the skin. Another can wait on a shelf for years because the one person it suits never happens to pass that shelf. Fragnatique works on both sides of that gap. For people, it learns their taste a little more with every choice and explains why a fragrance fits, which is the part a bare number cannot do. (How the score and its reason are put together is set out in Match Score, Explained.) For fragrance houses, it is a way for every creation in a range, not only the best-seller, to reach the people it suits best.

We are not simply recommending fragrances to people; we are helping fragrances find the people they were made for.

Ömer Kadir Kurt and Erdinç Karabekir, to Tehnopol

That sentence is the shortest description of the company we have: every fragrance was made for someone, and Fragnatique exists to make sure it reaches them.

Why did Fragnatique join the Tehnopol Startup Accelerator?

There is a point in a young company when proving that the idea works stops being enough, and the next question becomes how far it can go. Fragnatique had reached that point: the product was built, and people were seeing its value. What it needed now was experience, a network and an outside eye.

Tehnopol, the science and business campus in Tallinn, brings those together in one place: investors, technology companies, doors into industry, and people who have already carried products from Estonia to the rest of the world. The programme has started to deliver on that. Time with mentors who have built and backed companies, Raido Pikkar among them, has already sharpened how the founders weigh the decisions ahead.

The selection itself was announced in May, when Tehnopol named its new cohort; our note from that week, Fragnatique Joins Tehnopol Startup Incubator, covers the programme, the cohort and the six-month format. Around the accelerator sits the wider Estonian ecosystem that Startup Estonia supports, and the press facts for both are collected on the press page.

Where is Fragnatique heading?

The goal is simple to state: a place where people come to understand their own taste in scent, meet scents they would not have come across on their own, and see why those fragrances fit.

• A year from now: a new habit taking shape, with people opening Fragnatique before they buy a fragrance, much as they already let an app suggest their next song or series.
• Five years from now: that habit feels ordinary, and Fragnatique has become the intelligence layer for fragrance: the link between people and the scents that suit them, and, for the houses, a way for each creation in a house's range to find its audience.

The next Estonian unicorn, and one book

Tehnopol closes each startup story with the same two questions. On the next Estonian unicorn, the founders chose a pattern over a name: the companies that matter usually begin with a team that will not accept a problem everyone else has stopped noticing, and then solves it without fuss. It may well be taking shape in Tallinn right now. If it is, they hope it smells wonderful.

On reading, the answer was a single book: Mastery by Robert Greene. Its subject is the long apprenticeship that serious work demands, the patience, the repetition, the will to keep learning when no one is looking, and building a startup is much the same apprenticeship, served to your own idea.

Read the original story

The full interview, in the founders' own words, is on Tehnopol's site: Startup story: Fragnatique X Tehnopol Startup Accelerator, with an Estonian edition for readers in Estonia. To see what the founders describe, the perfume finder is the shortest way in, and the team pages say more about the people building it.