beauty-and-personal-care
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The Investors Who Put a Creative Agency Inside the Fund
CAVU Consumer Partners does not stop at writing checks. Its operator-investor model helped turn a farmer's-market vinegar drink into Poppi - and made brand design, distribution and talent part of the investment product.
Trell
Trell was an India-founded lifestyle social commerce platform where users shared roughly three-minute vertical videos about their interests - travel, beauty, food, fashion and wellness - across eight regional languages. Started in 2016 by four IIT-Bombay friends, it grew a large community skewed toward Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, then pivoted in 2020 into in-app shopping through 'Trell Shop.' It raised about $66 million from investors including Sequoia/Peak XV, KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Mirae Asset and H&M, before a 2022 governance probe and cash crunch triggered mass layoffs and a steep revenue collapse.
lululab Inc.
lululab Inc. is a South Korean beauty-and-healthcare AI company spun off from Samsung Electronics' C-Lab incubator in 2017. Its Lumini platform uses deep-learning computer vision to analyze a person's facial skin across seven categories - wrinkles, pores, acne, sebum, melasma, redness, and oil/moisture balance - from a single photo in about ten seconds, then recommends tailored products and routines. Built on a database of more than five million skin data points with claimed accuracy above 90%, lululab sells AI kiosks (Lumini Kiosk), a home device (Lumini Home), and an embeddable mobile SDK (Lumini SDK) to retailers, clinics, and brands worldwide.