As the beauty industry faces intensifying global regulations around ingredient usage, disclosures, and packaging, an ecosystem of early-stage artificial intelligence-enabled companies has emerged to help brands monitor, track, and plan for regulations.
In May, two of these regulatory-compliance AI startups, Certo and Certivo, both announced $4 million seed rounds. Startups like these are helping beauty companies and others operating in highly regulated sectors—including pharmaceuticals, food, supplements, pet food, and chemicals—to better organize their regulatory compliance data, which includes ingredients, vendor lists, and product claims.
Bastien Deliège-Coste, co-founder and CEO of Certo, said he was serving as a consultant for the beauty and fragrance industries when he first became aware of regulatory complexity. He noted that most beauty brands have very lean regulatory teams, mandated to ensure their brands adhere to US state-level requirements, federal regulations, international standards, and retailer requirements. On top of all that, most brands have their own guardrails for the ingredients they are willing to use.
Many beauty brands don’t have the funding for a single full-time regulatory expert who can perform comprehensive oversight across the full product lifecycle. This work includes the procurement of raw materials, research and development, marketing, on-pack claims, and how the commercial team talks about products.
It’s why these platforms may play a vital role in keeping independent brands compliant. Even for beauty conglomerates, experts say that much of that oversight is still performed manually, frequently resulting in employees or third-party contractors sending dozens of emails to suppliers to validate the source of the ingredients and gather documentation to share with regulators.
“What we see today with regulatory teams is that they're understaffed and a bit overwhelmed,” Deliège-Coste told BeautyMatter.
Certo’s system uses AI to validate that raw materials meet specifications across 250 checkpoints and has created a regulatory database that will cover 50 countries by the end of 2026, with a consumer interface that allows users to verify product compliance across dozens of countries.
Deliège-Coste said Certo also developed specialized AI agents—built with AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—that can perform some compliance checks autonomously. These specialized agents are able to validate raw materials, formula compliance, claims verification, artwork, marketing claims, and packaging.
The beauty industry regulations that Certo’s customers need to track include the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, the most sweeping expansion of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) oversight of the industry since 1938.
Known as MoCRA, it strengthened product listing requirements, requiring beauty companies to list with the FDA every product they sell, including all ingredients, and provide annual updates to the SKUs and formulations.
MoCRA also required the FDA to mandate manufacturing facility registration, fragrance allergen labeling requirements, and standardized testing methods to detect asbestos in talc-containing beauty products, and gave the agency greater authority to order mandatory recalls.
On the state level, laws to ban PFAS chemicals in cosmetics have been enacted in California, Minnesota, Colorado, and other states since 2025, with more bans expected in 2027. California and Washington both have safe cosmetics acts, banning 24 ingredients and over 30 ingredients, respectively.
In the European Union, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, known as PPWR, will go into effect in August 2026 and mandates waste reduction, bans some chemicals, and includes sustainability-focused packaging guidelines.
Another regulation in Europe is on the registration, evaluation, authorization, and restriction of chemicals, known as REACH. Manufacturers and importers are also now required to gather details about their chemical substances and register them with the European Chemicals Agency.
Kunal Chopra, co-founder and CEO of Certivo, told BeautyMatter that his startup began by focusing on the industrial manufacturing, aerospace, and medical devices industries, but has now expanded into beauty. His past work at ecommerce giant Amazon led Chopra to realize that for beauty and consumer brands, “one efficiency that kept standing out to me was around compliance, and how necessary compliance is for market access.”
Certivo operates as an AI-enabled software-as-a-service vendor that integrates into a customer’s existing systems, stitching together all layers of compliance: vendor and ingredient lists, external regulations, and internal company data from a variety of sources such as PDFs, Microsoft Excel sheets, and handwritten notes.
The platform then ingests all that information and can, for example, indicate how compliant a company may be with PFAS regulations in Minnesota. If the system were to determine that the manufacturer was just 85% compliant, Certivo’s system would detail the gaps that need to be addressed.
Chopra said the system is meant to be interactive and can offer probability percentages for compliance based on the information it has at any given time. “You don’t need your data to be complete for the system to start becoming live,” Chopra said. “You can build your data over time.”
Another startup in the space is the London-based Worldover, a global regulatory platform founded in 2022 that has raised $7 million to date, according to CEO and co-founder Edward Alun-Jones. Worldover has more than 250 enterprise clients, including German beauty company Cosnova, skincare and bodycare brand Nip + Fab, and skincare company Rodial.
“Many companies come to us, and they say, ‘We want to be an AI-first company,’ and some of them don’t really know what that means,” Alun-Jones told BeautyMatter.
He focuses first on data. Similar to Certivo and Certo, this involves collecting data from different systems like Excel and Google Drive for a “single source of truth.” From there, Worldover works with customers to assess which software systems they’ll need—and what they can ditch—and determines where AI agents can be deployed to handle formulation screening, input new regulatory updates, and other repetitive tasks.
“Every single beauty founder, whether they are a brand or a manufacturer, none of them got into it to do back-office operations,” said Alun-Jones of this work.
AI agents, he added, are an area where brands can get tripped up and need to be very careful about permission guardrails, which require detailed IT oversight into what data the agents can use and what messages they are authorized to send. While it may sound alluring for AI agents to automate work and generate efficiencies, Alun-Jones warned that “they are representing your business, they are writing emails to your suppliers, and they are in some cases actually making orders.
Puntt AI, another enterprise compliance automation platform, helps large consumer-product companies use AI agents to review creative and marketing materials on everything from websites and advertising to packaging. And with the use of generative AI, Puntt AI’s large, multinational CPG companies are generating more content than ever, all of which needs to be verified.
“These teams have to manually go review these laws and see how they apply to 10,000 SKUs,” Ronnie Kwesi Coleman, co-founder and CEO of Puntt AI, told BeautyMatter. “There’s a lot of data that these internal teams need to review, which is super complicated and super expensive.”
A few weeks ago, Coleman said, he had dinner with executives from L'Oréal. He left that conversation marveling that the French beauty giant was still able to move relatively quickly on new product development, and that it was due to its aggressive embrace of AI.
“If the incumbents like L'Oréal are moving faster than you with AI, you should rethink what you're doing, because you have to be exponentially faster than any incumbent,” said Coleman of the challenges that small- and mid-sized beauty players face.
Experts say that the global regulatory environment for beauty ingredients, product claims, and packaging will only become more complex in the years to come. To keep up—without having to hire additional staff or slow efforts to expand to new markets—AI startup founders believe their technology can protect revenue from regulatory risks, speed up go-to-market strategies to support international expansion, and generate workflow efficiencies.