Beauty company Oddity is to acquire Boston-based biotech startup Revela for $76m, in a bid to fuse drug discovery technology with beauty.
Revela is a biotechnology startup in Artificial Intelligence-based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness indications. The company already has patent-pending molecule ingredients, which it says are proven to improve efficacy for skin and hair based on clinical testing.
With the acquisition, Oddity, which owns beauty brands SpoiledChild and Il Makiage, has established Oddity Labs in Boston, with an additional $25m investment for its frontier lab.
Oran Holtzman, ODDITY’s co-founder and CEO said: “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.”
Dr. Evan Zhao Revela co-founder and CEO said: “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. 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”.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2023.