L’Oréal is expanding its search for scalable sustainable technologies, selecting 13 companies from eight countries for the second cohort of its €100 million ($114.7 million) L’AcceleratOR program.
The initiative aims to identify, pilot, and potentially scale technologies that address the beauty industry’s climate, circularity, and nature challenges. The latest cohort broadens the program's geographical reach and technological scope by selecting L’Oréal’s first water-focused technologies alongside solutions spanning packaging, ingredients, recycling, manufacturing, and data intelligence.
L’Oréal Group generated €44.05 billion ($50.5 billion) in sales in 2025 and operates 22 research centers across seven regional hubs, supported by more than 4,000 scientists. Rather than limiting the program to beauty-specific startups, the group is looking across industries for technologies it could apply to its global operations. The group selected four companies for next-generation packaging and materials. UK-based Arda Biomaterials is developing a plant-based alternative to leather for premium materials, while Italy’s Bormioli Luigi is working on ultralight, resistant glass packaging. French company Auressens is developing recyclable, metal-free reflective pigments, and US-based Newlight Technologies converts methane into packaging materials.
On the formulation side, German biotechnology company Bioweg uses precision fermentation to develop new raw materials. China’s Envision Energy is developing green ammonia produced using renewable energy for potential application in hair colorants.
Industrial processes make up the largest part of the second cohort. India’s Without is developing recycling technology for hard-to-recycle flexible packaging, while China’s HCpect is focused on chemical recycling for plastic waste. US-based MacroCycle is developing a lower-carbon process for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
India’s Nexus Power produces batteries using agricultural waste, while Finnish company Upheat Solutions is developing industrial heat pump technology intended to improve energy efficiency.
US-based Laminar uses intelligent sensors to improve industrial water management and reduce consumption, while Waterplan has developed an AI-native platform designed to identify water and biodiversity risks and support localized action.
“We are working to unlock new frontiers in the beauty industry through pioneering solutions,” said Ezgi Barcenas, Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at L’Oréal, in the press release. “This second L’AcceleratOR cohort reflects our ambition to bring together entrepreneurial ingenuity, scientific progress, and the global reach of L’Oréal to help scale breakthrough innovations."
The second cohort follows L’AcceleratOR’s first intake this year, when L’Oréal selected 13 startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from nearly 1,000 applications across 101 countries. The first group was weighted heavily toward packaging, with six companies developing alternatives including seaweed-based packaging, fiber caps, paper bottles, bioplastics, and wood-based protective materials. Others focused on biosourced ingredients, waste processing, biomethane, and supply-chain emissions.
For L’Oréal, the focus is now on whether these technologies can work at scale across its global operations. The 13 companies will now enter an acceleration phase led by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), focused on preparing their technologies for pilots. Selected companies can then access L’Oréal’s resources to launch pilot projects lasting between six and nine months, with successful technologies potentially scaled across the group’s international operations.
“We’re excited to welcome the second cohort in the L’AcceleratOR program after many months of careful selection to find commercially relevant solutions in target geographies internationally,” said James Cole, Chief Innovation Officer at CISL, in the press release.
Beauty companies have spent years setting targets around emissions, packaging, water, and waste, but achieving those ambitions increasingly requires technologies that sit outside their traditional areas of expertise. Accelerator programs offer large companies a way to tap external innovations while giving smaller technology businesses access to the systems required to test whether their solutions work at industry scale.
The second cohort also suggests the problems beauty companies are looking to solve are moving further upstream. Some technologies have clear consumer-facing applications (lighter glass bottles or new packaging materials, for example), but others target the less visible environmental footprint behind a beauty product, from the energy required to manufacture it to the treatment of plastic waste and management of industrial water. If successful, the technologies consumers never see could ultimately prove as consequential as the sustainable packaging they do.