beauty-tech
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Therabody Turned an $84 Crisis Into 6.5 Million Massage Guns - Here’s the Eight-Year Grind You Can Copy
A chiropractor spent eight years turning a jigsaw wrapped in a dish towel into a premium wellness platform. The useful lesson is not the hardware - it is how Therabody earned trust one treatment room at a time, then stretched a product into a habit.
GLAMCOR Bet $200,000 on Cosmetics. Customers Only Wanted the Light.
A failed construction business, a year in cheap Chinese hotels and one oddly revealing trade show turned Erik Kaiser’s lighting hunch into a global hardware company. Its best lesson is simple: watch what customers crowd around, especially when it is not the product you planned to sell.
The Finnish startup that reads 120 things in your selfie so beauty brands don't have to guess
It began with a founder's own unexplained skin problem. It turned into an AI advisor now embedded in roughly 120 beauty brands and retailers - and, lately, inside ChatGPT.
Lady Gaga Burned Down Her Own Makeup Brand - Then It Grew 400%
Haus Labs failed quietly on Amazon. Then Gaga and CEO Ben Jones threw out every formula, moved to Sephora, and bet the company on fermented arnica and 51 shades.
The Beauty Industry Still Runs on Spreadsheets. Good Face Project Is Selling the Exit.
Good Face Project began by helping shoppers decode ingredient labels. Then its founders found a larger problem upstream: cosmetic chemists were still building global products in spreadsheets while regulations multiplied around them.
The 145-Year-Old Beauty Company Hiding in Plain Sight
Wella survived wigs, perms, conglomerates and lockdowns. Now the salon-born company is betting that the person behind the chair is still beauty's most useful laboratory.
The $750 Million Bet on Everything Around the Barber Chair
SQUIRE stopped trying to be OpenTable for haircuts and learned to run the whole shop. A decade later, its software sits between the calendar, the card reader, the barber, and the customer.
L’Oréal Is Building the Operating System Behind Your Bathroom Shelf
The French group does not simply sell lipstick, serum and shampoo. It runs a four-division machine that turns laboratory research, local taste and brand mythology into products for 1.3 billion consumers.
Sephora
Sephora took beauty out from behind the counter and turned discovery into an operating system - part store, part laboratory, part media channel. Now the LVMH-owned retailer is using loyalty, technology and global reach to decide what prestige beauty looks like next.
Colavo Ground
Colavo Ground is a Seoul-founded software company behind ColavoSalon, a free mobile-first CRM and booking platform for independent beauty professionals and salons. It bundles online booking, an appointment calendar, automated multi-channel reminders, loyalty and package tools, staff commissions and sales analytics into one app, aiming to cut no-shows and improve client retention. Colavo says it is used by well over 100,000 beauty pros across dozens of countries, and has raised roughly $3.77M, with a Series A round in 2021.
Belle.ai
Belle.ai (legally BelleTorus Corporation) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building AI that reads skin from an ordinary smartphone photo. Its Belle 1K Skin AI engine uses geometric image analysis to surface comparable references across more than 1,600 skin conditions and to produce objective severity scores for immune-mediated diseases like psoriasis, eczema, acne, vitiligo and alopecia. The goal is practical: give general practitioners, estheticians and providers in places with few dermatologists a tool to assess, document and track skin at the point of care. The technology is used across more than 60 countries and 1,000-plus provider sites, and the company has drawn contracts and recognition from ARPA-H and CMS.
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.
Prose
Prose is a New York-based beauty-tech company that makes custom haircare and skincare to order. An online consultation feeds a proprietary AI engine that blends from a library of natural ingredients into formulas tailored to each customer's hair, scalp, skin, lifestyle, and even local climate. Founded in 2017 by ex-L'Oreal and Phyto executives, Prose is a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a carbon-neutral brand that has produced millions of bespoke products and reached profitability while expanding into skincare and licensing its technology stack, Singular.