The consumer technology platform Oddity, the parent company of Il Makiage and Spoiled Child, made its third acquisition, scooping up Revela, a Boston-based biotechnology start-up and forerunner in Artificial Intelligence–based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness.
WHO: Founded in 2021, Revela is revolutionizing beauty and wellness as one of the industry's most advanced biotechnology platforms, and a leader in AI-based molecule discovery. Revela was founded by Dr. Evan Zhao, Dr. David Zhang, Avi Boppana, and Ying Tung (Evelyn) Chen. Its world-class team has expertise from Harvard and MIT in synthetic biology, high-throughput screening, assay and model development, and machine learning. Revela already has patent-pending molecule ingredients proven to have significant stepwise improvements in efficacy for skin and hair based on clinical testing. Revela has hundreds of molecules in its development pipeline today, spanning a wide range of beauty and wellness applications.
Oddity is a consumer tech company that builds and scales digital-first brands to disrupt the offline-dominated beauty and wellness industries. The company owns Il Makiage and Spoiled Child. Oddity, with a US HQ in New York City and an R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel, has built one of the industry's most advanced technology platforms, which leverages data science, machine learning, and computer vision capabilities to deliver a better online experience for consumers. The company uses cutting-edge data science to identify consumer needs and develops solutions in the form of beauty, wellness, and tech products.
As part of its technology platform, which currently serves its own brands and over 40 million users, Oddity has developed several key consumer-facing technology products, including:
WHY: With the acquisition of Boston-based Revela, a leading biotech start-up, and the establishment of Oddity Labs, the company taps into a proven drug discovery technology, bringing it into beauty and wellness.
Oddity will build Oddity Labs in Boston, MA, as a biotechnology research and development center to power the business's product innovation for the future by discovering and developing molecules, probiotics, peptides, and other biological modalities. It will be built to revolutionize the market through patented, proprietary technologies and capabilities, including AI-based molecule discovery and what they believe is the world's most advanced phenotypic database to understand the biological mechanisms that drive cellular behavior for beauty and wellness indications. The Revela founding team will lead Oddity Labs.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: "Oddity is deploying its strong balance sheet to continue reinventing the beauty and wellness market and cement our competitive advantage and technology moat," said Oran Holtzman, Oddity's co-founder and CEO. "With 40M+ users, 1B+ data points and dozens of machine-learning algorithms, we believe Oddity is years ahead of our industry when it comes to technology. With the acquisition of Revela, we are doubling down on innovation but this time around science-backed product development and bringing proven pharma-grade technology to beauty and wellness. Not just for one ingredient or to solve one pain point—but with a platform that spans categories, use cases, and form factors. We believe the combination of Oddity's dominant direct to consumer platform and scaling machine with Revela's biotechnology will be a game changer for the industry. Together we will redefine product efficacy via AI-based molecule discovery engines for the benefit of consumers worldwide. Revela's multi-category pipeline will be launched via Oddity's current and future brands to support future growth."
"Advances in computation and molecular biology have ushered in a new era of discovery and development. We can now far better understand the biological pathways that drive the behavior of cells, and we can also identify novel molecules that influence that behavior to deliver desired outcomes, in ways that were never possible before," says Dr. Evan Zhao, Revela co-founder and CEO. "We believe this technology, which is already widely used in pharma for drug discovery, allows us to create targeted and highly efficacious products across an unlimited range of consumer needs, and do it with a speed and efficiency that the industry has never seen before."
"We founded Revela to change the beauty and wellness industry, which has stagnated from underinvestment in science and technology," says Dr. Zhao, founder and CEO of Revela. "While biotechnology has broken new ground in molecule discovery, beauty and wellness has fallen behind for decades, and is serving consumers repackaged versions of sub-optimal ingredients that have been used for decades. Together with Oddity and its technology platform and online capabilities, we believe we will change this paradigm and redefine the industry."
"We have seen the transformational powers of biotechnology and artificial intelligence on drug discovery, and are unleashing these technologies in the beauty and wellness space with massive investment," said Holtzman. "While our competitors are stuck in the past, adding Revela will allow us to build the future of R&D for the category, just as we did with our technology center in Tel Aviv."
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