A consequential pivot is brewing in beauty investing. Although private equity and venture firms once evaluated deals almost entirely on category whitespace, gross margin, and Total Addressable Market (TAM), a growing cohort of investors are now underwriting something harder to model on a spreadsheet: cultural relevance. The industry is calling it “culture vesting,” the practice of backing founders, communities, and cultural movements as durable commercial assets, rather than simply betting on a product with a clever formulation.
There has been a recent increase in investors not just investing in brands with huge potential but also in brands who have a very strong community behind them. BeautyMatter had conversations with investors and founders of L’Attitude Ventures, the venture fund built around US Latino founders; Aria Growth Partners, a minority-stake growth fund with stakes in Hero Cosmetics, The INKEY List, and Good Molecules; and Ruka Hair, the textured hair tech brand that has raised multiple rounds. The conclusion from all three is a consistent thesis: Community is no longer a marketing output of a good brand; it is being treated as the investable asset itself.
That reframing is showing up in deal terms, diligence questions, and portfolio construction across the beauty investment landscape. It is also colliding with hard numbers including funding gaps, the spending power of multicultural consumers, and the risk that “monetizing culture” tips into something founders and communities alike are increasingly wary of.
L’Attitude Ventures was built on a specific capital gap. Cecilia Sanchez, who sits on the investment team, explained that the fund’s founding thesis rested on the fact that Latino founders remain a target demographic for the company’s funds, because “[Since 2021], Latino founders received less than 2% of venture funding dollars,” despite being, in her words, “one of the biggest cohorts in the US who start one in every four new businesses.” L’Attitude’s approach isn’t simply to write checks to fill that gap, but instead to actively weigh a brand’s community engagement alongside financial metrics.
Sanchez described the diligence around Nopalera, one of the fund’s standout portfolio companies, in these terms: “Activations at boutiques translated into people who would just flock to her counter and buy her things,” which, she said, showed that community meant activation and buying power. Laura Lucas, another Partner at L’Attitude Ventures, went further, arguing that community isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. “Community is everything. It is an absolute key part of brand building today,” she said, adding that even large incumbent brands are trying to reverse-engineer their go-to-market plans to drive more of their brand building through community.
Aria Growth, which takes only minority stakes so founders retain control, applies a parallel filter. Co-founder Jackie Dunklau said “the fund looks for brands that are offering differentiated products or solutions,” but that the deciding factor is usually the brand’s founder. Crucially, Dunklau flagged how much harder it is to identify community and culture in a social-first market. “The hardest part for us now is trying to determine if [brands] have a true community. It’s not just driven by a viral moment or a hero product, but [if they’ve] created true brand love and true community,” she said.
Ruka Hair’s Tendai Moyo has managed funds from three different investor pools simultaneously—tech angels, biotech and AI funds, and what she calls “community and culture investors,” including entrepreneurs such as YouTuber Patricia Bright. She described the trade-off bluntly. “Your tech angel has historically underpriced distribution and trust, [including] the value of community, the value of retail credibility, and the value of social capital, while culture-first capital historically underpriced the technical risk and the defensibility questions.”
Moyo’s strategy with Ruka Hair, she said, has been to code-switch between both rooms at the same time, building a patented product while leading with community. One investor’s reaction stuck with her. Charlie Songhurst, an early Microsoft hire, told her, “I’ve never thought of community [and culture] as a point of defensibility, but actually your community is why you guys are still here today.”
What’s notable across all three conversations is that “community”is being reduced to hard, repeatable metrics. Sanchez was explicit that L’Attitude discounts follower counts almost entirely in favor of repeat-purchase rate and in-person conversion. Dunklau applies a similar filter at Aria, but with a harder financial floor: a minimum of $10 million in trailing 12-month revenue, proximity to breakeven, and a test she called “true brand love”—distinguishing a durable customer base from a viral moment or a hero product that spikes and fades.
Moyo described the most rigorous version of this. Ruka’s diligence with Henkel ran over a year, included more than 10 R&D calls and lab testing on its fiber, and required patents and trademarks to be secured before “community trust” carried any weight at all. Taken together, the pattern is a two-part test: quantitative proof that community converts to revenue (repeat purchase, retention, conversion at activations), plus qualitative proof that the founder, not a moment, is the source of the growth.
The “why now?” is largely a story of consumer economics catching up with underpriced demographics. US Latino purchasing power reached $4.4 trillion in 2024, making the community's economy the fourth-largest in the world if measured independently, according to the Latino Donor Collaborative’s 2026 report with Arizona State University. Yet capital flow hasn’t caught up; even as Crunchbase reported a Q1 2026 rebound, Black founders captured just 0.32% of the $290 billion in total US venture capital deployed in 2025. Textured hair and beauty categories sit squarely inside that mismatch: Black consumers increased beauty spending by 10% to $8 billion between February 2022 and 2023, outpacing the broader US market despite inflation, while the global Black haircare market alone is projected to grow from $8.85 billion in 2026 to $14.34 billion by 2035.
It is worth stating plainly that community-as-asset isn’t a strategy reserved for underrepresented founders. It is simply most visible there right now, because those founders have had to build it deliberately in the absence of easy distribution or brand-name capital. The clearest large-scale proof of the thesis lies entirely outside that frame. When L’Occitane paid $450 million for an 83% stake in Sol de Janeiro in November 2021, founder Heela Yang rolled over roughly 17% of her equity and stayed on as CEO, and the acquirer largely left the brand alone.
By its fiscal year ending March 2025, Sol de Janeiro’s net sales had climbed to roughly $1.2 billion, and the bodycare and fragrance line had overtaken Rare Beauty to become Sephora North America’s top-selling brand across every category, outselling color cosmetics in the country’s biggest specialty beauty retailer. Yang revealed that “over 90% of our growth this year is from social, and it's organic,” the kind of unpaid, community-driven growth engine that tends to break the moment a new owner tries to “optimize” it with a media-mix model.
Culturally rooted brands appear to be converting spending power into loyalty more efficiently than generalist competitors: 64% of Hispanic consumers actively seek out brands that acknowledge their culture and traditions, compared with 48% of the rest of the population, per Kantar’s US DEI Monitor. Moyo argued the capital hasn’t scaled to match that opportunity. “We should be seeing 10x what is being invested right now into this space,” she said, pointing out that Ruka Hair’s next round, targeted at roughly $12 million, still trails what she called “our [other] counterparts, who are raising double that or triple that.” Even so, she’s clear the category’s momentum isn’t hype. Strategic investor Henkel, owner of Olaplex, backed Ruka Hair because “they’re choosing to back a brand built on community trust as their lever into a space that is growing and where they’re making money.”
Treating community as an asset class raises a harder question: What happens when the relationship turns transactional? Dunklau said Aria’s minority-stake structure is designed precisely to reassure founders that capital won’t dilute what made the brand work. “We’re really looking to be value-added partners; we never buy the majority,” she said, adding that the goal is to amplify what’s already working, not take it over.
When brands make a funding announcement, consumer suspicion becomes real, and founders feel it. Moyo pointed to public backlash against brands accused of going quiet on community work after taking investment, and described her own vetting process for capital. “Not all capital is good capital,” she said, recounting how Henkel funded Ruka Hair’s “pro academy” stylist education with, in her words, “no return for them besides supporting and tapping into our community and culture” as proof of genuine commitment rather than extraction.
Her broader framing of why founders take investment at all cuts to the ethical core of culture vesting. “When someone takes investment, it is for the community,” she said, “because bringing on investors to your cap table [means] additional people to report to.” That tension between culture as a genuine growth lever and culture as a narrative dressed up for diligence decks is likely to define how far culture vesting scales. For now, though, the investors and founders driving it agree the direction of travel is set.
