The Tamesis
This article is part of The Future of Artificial Intelligence, a collection of articles that explores how artificial intelligence will impact the fashion and beauty industries in the coming years.
The beauty industry is the fastest adopting AI in the luxury goods industry, and as the technology develops rapidly, beauty conglomerates are vying to grab a piece of the AI pie. In recent months, L’Oréal and AI chip maker Nvidia have expanded their AI partnerships for beauty R&D, The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has tapped AI startup Rezolve AI to better develop its brand websites for search and discovery in 70 markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and LVMH has announced it will deepen its partnership with Google in its fashion and beauty businesses, including MaIA, the brand’s AI chatbot.
Beauty AI companies are winning over brands large and small, promising growth that was previously unattainable. Here are four emerging AI companies backed by beauty giants that are shaping the future of beauty.
debut
Founder: Joshua Brittain
Funding to date: US$80 million
Major investors: L’Oréal venture capital funds Bold, Material Impact, Fine Structure Ventures and GS Futures
The most important thing about artificial intelligence in beauty is speed. Joshua Britton has built a platform at Debut that combines artificial intelligence with genomics (the study of gene function and interactions), biotechnology, and compresses years of research and development into months to create new high-performance ingredients without relying entirely on chemists. The technology collects recipes and data to create new ingredients and tests them based on research gathered from brands and labs.
“By accelerating millions of years of evolution, we can design targeted ingredients with clinically proven performance in the emerging field of dermatology,” said Britton, founder and CEO of Debut, which launched in 2019 to focus on biotech in the beauty space. The brand has partnered with the L’Oréal portfolio and Image Skincare, as well as beauty treatment clinics and retailer Formula Fig.
In January, the company launched Dermceutical EDL, a topical bioactive ingredient that provides professional-grade skin tightening results similar to Botox. EDL works by activating cellular pathways targeted by clinical procedures and stimulating dermal fibroblasts to strengthen elastin, resulting in clinically proven skin tightening and tightening results.
Britton predicts that with innovations in biotechnology, artificial intelligence in beauty will become performance-driven, and the lines between beauty, pharmaceuticals and nutrition will become increasingly blurred due to the accelerated development of artificial intelligence. “The current set of active ingredients will be replaced by molecules with functions not yet imagined,” he said. “Their names may not be familiar today, but their superiority will soon be established by their outstanding scientific performance and beauty-leading claims, all validated by clinical testing.”
Going forward, Britton believes his company will expand into related industries, including food, beverages and functional nutrition. “In this industrial revolution, we won’t turn to nature to discover new plants or wait for chemists to invent something,” he said.
Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Founder: Anastasia Georgievskaya and Konstantin Kiselev
Funding to date: $2.8 million
Major investors: Ulta Beauty’s venture capital firms LongeVC, Grupo Boticário and Prisma Ventures
Haut.AI co-founder Anastasia Georgievskaya is a scientist trained with a degree in biophysics. She began her career in drug discovery and then moved into cosmetics manufacturing and testing. “When analyzing all these clinical studies, the results are very revealing: Skin care products work, but for some reason consumers think they don’t,” Georgievskaya said. “The reason is we don’t all experience the same effects of the product.”
Haut.AI’s technology analyzes skin health and recommends products based on the analysis. With the launch of Haut.AI, Georgievskaya is on a mission to make personalized skincare routines easily accessible to consumers via their mobile phones. The platform is also venturing into hair analysis, a category expansion of artificial intelligence tools.
