NEW YORK– ODDITY, the consumer technology platform built to transform the global beauty and wellness market, today announces the $76M acquisition of Boston-based Revela, an industry leading biotechnology startup and forerunner in Artificial Intelligence-based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness indications. With the acquisition, the company will establish ODDITY LABS in Boston with an additional $25M 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 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.”
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.
“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 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.
“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.”
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.
ODDITY LABS
With the acquisition of Revela, ODDITY will build ODDITY LABS in Boston, MA with a $25M investment for its frontier lab. ODDITY LABS will be a biotechnology research and development center to power ODDITY’s product innovation for the future, through the discovery and development of molecules, probiotics, peptides, and other biological modalities. It is being built to revolutionize the market through patented, proprietary technologies and capabilities, including AI-based molecule discovery, and what we believe is the world’s most advanced phenotypic database to understand the biological mechanisms that drive cellular behavior for beauty and wellness indications.
ODDITY LABS will be led by the Revela founding team. Dr. Zhao joins ODDITY as Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. David Zhang, Revela’s CSO, joins as Head of Bioengineering and Mr. Avi Boppana, Revela’s CTO, joins as Head of Platform.
“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.”
AI-Based Molecule Discovery
AI-based molecule discovery is a transformative frontier in product development, enabled by the advancements of technologies including synthetic biology, genomic sequencing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The technological approach is already proven and widely used in the field of biotechnology for drug discovery. Revela is the forerunner in implementing and scaling AI-based molecule discovery for beauty and wellness, which allows Revela to identify small molecules that are both highly efficacious and safe, and to do it cost efficiently, with accelerated lead times.
This multi-step process leverages biological and computational technologies to drive discovery and optimization:
- High throughput screening of tens of thousands of molecules is conducted using biological assays
- Results are fed through an ensemble of deep learning models to scale screening across millions of potential molecules
- Lead molecules are identified with in vitro validation
- Comprehensive safety testing is conducted both in silico and ex-vivo prior to product development
- Human clinical testing is conducted to validate results
After a winner is identified, molecules are continuously optimized to find the best-in-class, using medicinal chemistry and biological mechanism-based optimization through RNA sequencing, molecular docking, and molecule representation algorithms.
