Oddity, the parent company of several d2C beauty brands including Il Makiage and SpoiledChild, has acquired Boston-based Revela, a biotechnology startup and forerunner in Artificial Intelligence-based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness indications, in a transaction valued at $76 million.
 
With the acquisition, Oddity 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 beauty products, for the benefit of consumers around the world.

Reinventing the Beauty & Wellness Market

“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,” Holtzman explained. “Not just for one ingredient or to solve one pain point – but with a platform that spans categories, use cases, and form factors.
 
Holtzman believes the combination of Oddity’s direct to consumer platform and scaling machine with Revela’s biotechnology will be “a game changer for the industry.”
 
Together, they aim to 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.

Creating Efficacious Products

“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 a unlimited range of consumer needs, and do it with a speed and efficiency that the industry has never seen before.”
 
Revela already 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 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.
 
According to 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, Zhao believes they will change this paradigm and redefine the industry.
 
The transaction was signed and is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including satisfaction of applicable regulatory waiting periods. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2023.