The buzz around artificial intelligence has affected nearly every industry, from technology to restaurants, and the beauty industry is no exception.
Oddity, a data-driven beauty platform, is one company with a strong interest in leveraging AI technology. The parent company of Il Makiage and SpoiledChild recently announced it had acquired Revela, a Boston-based biotech startup that uses AI-powered tools to discover ingredients and research new formulations.
Valued at a total of $76 million, the deal is Oddity’s largest acquisition to date and also involves an additional $25 million investment to fund Oddity Labs, a biotechnology center.
“We are doubling down on this innovation, but this time we are using biotechnology to discover the most exciting and promising functional ingredients for consumers,” said Lindsay Drucker Mann, CFO of Oddity. told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “This is technology that has already been proven in the pharmaceutical industry. Today we are harnessing its power and unlocking it as an indicator of beauty and wellness.”
The total investment of over $100 million aims to introduce AI-based molecular discovery, commonly used in drug development, to accelerate research and development in cosmetics and other beauty products.
Revela’s AI tools will help researchers better identify and test new molecules that can solve customer pain points, Odditi said in a statement. Drucker Mann said it would also speed up the otherwise much trial-and-error discovery process.
“Now, with AI, our ability to explore these components has been greatly enhanced, with estimates ranging from thousands to over a billion and which ones are most likely to elicit the desired response from cells. Now I can confirm,” she said.
Drucker Mann said the beauty sector is booming right now, but he believes the beauty industry lags behind in terms of innovation and ingredient development.
“It’s a great category with lots of opportunities for growth,” she said. “But the truth is that the industry is behind the times when it comes to product innovation and ingredient development. Most of them are remixes and repackages of the same ingredients that have been around for decades.”
Drucker Mann explained that it is not just artificial intelligence that will propel the beauty industry forward, but other forms of technology such as synthetic biology and robotics.
“Many of these enabling technologies have reached threshold levels that actually enable previously impossible biotechnological solutions,” she said. “We know those solutions exist. We see them in the pharmaceutical industry. They are invested in beauty and wellness and have never been discovered.”
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