04.27.23
Oddity, the consumer technology platform built to transform the global beauty and wellness market, has acquired Boston-based Revela, an industry leading biotechnology startup and forerunner in artificial intelligence-based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness indications, for $76 million.
With the acquisition, the company will establish Oddity Labs in Boston with an additional $25 million investment for its frontier lab. The business combination will boost the development and expansion of proprietary, science-backed, clinically tested, and highly efficacious products, for the benefit of consumers around the world.
“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 40 million-plus users, one billion-plus 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.”
He continued, “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.”
Revela Among the Industry’s Most Advanced Biotech Platforms
Founded in 2021, Revela says its revolutionizing beauty and wellness as one of the industry’s most advanced biotechnology platforms, and a leader in AI-based molecule discovery.
“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,” said 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 a unlimited range of consumer needs, and do it with a speed and efficiency that the industry has never seen before.”
Revela has patent-pending molecule ingredients proven to have significant step-wise 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. Its existing suite of new molecules will be integrated into Oddity’s current and future brands, and further developed to find next generation solutions.
Revela’s ingredients that are already in-market are ProCelinyl and Fibroquin. ProCelinyl is a novel small molecule that supports the dermal papilla cells and brings hair follicles to a more vibrant state. Procelinyl’s powerful efficacy has been validated in clinical studies. In consumer studies, formulations with this ingredient have consistently outperformed market leading competitors in terms of user satisfaction and efficacy - not just in hair, but also in brow and lash. We believe the ingredient has the potential to redefine the entire hair growth category, which has not seen meaningful innovation in 40 years.
Fibroquin is a novel small molecule that supports the pro-collagen pathway in skin to promote skin elasticity and plumpness. In a human clinical study, subjects using the Fibroquin essence had a two times improvement in skin elasticity compared to subjects using a gold-standard 0.5% retinol serum, in eight weeks. Fibroquin formulas resulted in superior anti-aging effects to a best-in-class retinol, without the irritation effects of retinol.
“We founded Revela to change the beauty and wellness industry, which has stagnated from underinvestment in science and technology,” said 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.”