Olauto

The pitch is a cheap category made expensive on purpose. Olauto sells car air fresheners at $33 each, in a sculpted form the founders spent two years designing — testing weights to see how the object moved while hanging — using a polymer infused with 40% fragrance oil so the scent unfolds over more than three months rather than fading in a fortnight. The five launch scents are named the way a car is talked about, not a perfume: OMW, Root 66, Dad's Truck, Formula Sun, '67 Velvette. Tyler Handley described the thinking on the TechTO stage in June 2026: "my new business is a car fragrance brand, so cheap category, typically cheap category, and making it more premium through brand design, some technological innovation", and said he had built it around his own life — cars, design, fragrance. He and his brother Braden had co-founded inkbox in 2015 and sold it to BIC in January 2022 for $65M upfront; their cousins Dylan Bisignano and Victor Chimenti are the other two founders, and it was Bisignano — after upgrading to a BMW — who raised the category in the first place. The brand soft-launched to friends and family in September 2025 on $150,000 of initial backing, and ships from Canada to the US, UK, Australia, Italy, New Zealand and South Africa.