TAGS: Skin Care Hair Care Sustainability / Natural Cosmetics
BOLD, L'Oréal’s corporate venture capital fund, announced a minority investment in Debut, making it the exclusive beauty industry investor in the company.
Investment to Enable Debut to Meet the Growing Demand for Ingredients
The investment will enable Debut, a US biotech company to rapidly scale its manufacturing platform and meet the growing demand for breakthrough ingredients to be used in cosmetics, skincare, and packaging.
The investment builds on existing joint development programs between L’Oréal and Debut that leverage Debut’s extensive IP portfolio, from which more than 7,000 ingredients can be created in order to bring high-value, more sustainable ingredients to market faster.
San Diego, California-based Debut specializes in the end-to-end discovery, formulation, clinical trial, and manufacture of novel ingredients and products. Their cell-free advanced biomanufacturing platform bypasses the limitations of traditional fermentation and takes direct control of biological processes to produce complex natural products, such as polyphenols, biopolymers, and natural colors, prized for their high-performance, anti-aging, and antioxidant properties.
This type of synthetic biology significantly reduces complexity and increases the quantity of products that can be achieved. Using the platform, new ingredients can be delivered in as few as six weeks, from discovery to pre-production, for use in a host of higher performing, more sustainably made beauty products, from moisturizers to serums to hair care.
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Debut addresses one of the beauty world’s fundamental challenges: driving innovation without the resource-intensity and environmental impact that comes with relying on traditional manufacturing alone,” said Barbara Lavernos, deputy chief executive officer in charge of Research, Innovation, and Technology, at L’Oréal.
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Cell-free biomanufacturing is not science fiction: it is here. We could not be more excited to be the first beauty company to invest into this technology with Debut. We are delighted of our partnership with Debut to create together stand-out active beauty innovations while protecting the planet’s resources.”
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We are absolutely delighted to have L’Oréal as an investor at a time when advanced sciences are needed to thoroughly re-imagine how beauty ingredients are made, to address the challenges of cost, quality, scalability, and sustainability head-on,” said Joshua Britton, Ph.D., founder and chief executive officer, Debut. “
Debut’s ambition is to turn the active ingredient manufacturing process on its head, and in doing so, help industry leaders like L’Oréal maintain its innovative edge and desirability, fulfilling its responsibility to both the planet and consumers.”
Source: L'Oréal
