Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that powers a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a business.  Accel’s vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries. Accel-backed companies include Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Lookout Security, MoPub, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Vox Media, and others.

Accel

First Round is a seed-stage venture firm focused on building a vibrant community of technology entrepreneurs and companies, including Uber, Square, and Warby Parker. Through custom-built software, incredible in-person experiences, and a host of other unique services, First Round helps tiny companies get big while constantly reimagining the role of venture capital. It offers a growing number of services and products to help founders build companies from scratch. First Round has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

First Round Capital

Harrison Metal invests in early-stage technology companies in consumer, business services, and developer tools sectors. Harrison Metal speiclaizes in the fields of financial services, venture capital, and early-stage investment.

Harrison Metal

Lerer Hippeau is a seed-stage venture capital firm founded and operated in New York City. Since 2010, they have invested in entrepreneurs with great ideas who aren’t afraid to do hard things. Their portfolio includes more than 400 enterprise and consumer businesses including Guideline, MIRROR, Blockdaemon, K Health, Allbirds, ZenBusiness, and Thrive. They’re experienced operators who invest early and stay in their founders’ corners as they build iconic companies.

Lerer Hippeau

At Forerunner, we believe in a better way to invest. We’re a venture capital firm focused on understanding the mindset of the modern consumer and identifying the people poised to deliver what they need. We believe that when entrepreneurs are poised to meet consumers not just where they are today but where they’re going to be tomorrow, they become more than just founders — they’re forerunners. By supporting them with funding, strategic wisdom, and consumer insight — our “CQ” — we help transform industries and drive culture forward.    We’re a San Francisco-based team of veterans and visionaries from multiple disciplines. What unites us is a shared belief that “good enough” just isn’t good enough. We’ve used our combined expertise to support trailblazing brands like Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Hims & Hers, and dozens more.

Forerunner

Slow Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in companies central to the technology industry as well as those operating at the intersection of science, society, and culture. The firm seeks to support innovative ideas and solutions that shape the future across various sectors.

Slow Ventures

Grace Beauty Capital is an early stage venture capital firm dedicated to the consumer & retail sectors founded on the core belief that deep domain and industry knowledge, operating expertise and extensive networks are essential to support early stage entrepreneurs and generate superior investment returns. Our mission is to become the premier partner for early stage digital brands, consumer and retail technology startups on the journey from kitchen table to household name.

Grace Beauty Capital

One part Consumer Investment Firm, one part Strategic Creative Agency.  Bullish is an early stage consumer investment firm based in NYC. Current and past investments include Peloton, Casper, Harry’s, Warby Parker, Care/Of, Function of Beauty, Hu Chocolate, and Sunday Lawn.

Bullish

Grape Arbor is an angel investor group comprised of friends who spend their professional lives in the technology and start-up space and pool their personal finances to make angel investments.    Since its founding in 2006, Grape Arbor LLC (directly or through affiliates) has made one or more investments into more than two dozen companies.  Grape Arbor has made investments in advertising/marketing online, web 2.0/social networking, financial services (tech and non-tech), and software/web-enhanced services.    While a number of investments have been into companies with products at the pre-beta stage, Grape Arbor has made one initial investment into a company which, at the time, had roughly $15MM of trailing 12 month revenue.    In general, however, Grape Arbor targets early stage companies with a little revenue (several hundred thousand to several million in trailing 12 month revenue).    All of the companies considered seriously had a clear strategy for attacking a large and rapidly growing addressable market as well as a strong (even if not complete) management team.  Grape Arbor has made investments in which co-investors have been: First Round Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Carlyle, Insight Venture Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Vision Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners and others.

Grape Arbor VC

Red Swan is a seed stage venture capital firm investing in entrepreneurs who delight customers, create culture, and disrupt industries.  If Black Swans are unforeseen calamitous events, Red Swans are great companies most of us never saw coming. They are built by entrepreneurs who create joy for their customers, provide meaning to their employees, and who scare their shareholders by passing on acquisition offers. They tend to be movements as much as businesses.

Red Swan Ventures

Viking Global Investors is an investment firm that uses fundamental analysis to select investments across industries and geographies. It is a global investment firm managing more than twenty billion in capital across long-short equity and long-only strategies. The firm was established in 1999 and is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, with offices in New York City, Hong Kong, and London.

Viking Global Investors

Comcast Ventures is the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation and partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs building transformative consumer and enterprise companies.

Comcast Ventures

Glynn Capital Management focuses on investing in leading private and public technology growth companies. Glynn Capital Management seeks to be long-term investors in a limited number of excellent companies with management teams, sustainable business models, and long-term growth potential.

Glynn Capital Management

Aspect Ventures partners with entrepreneurs who want to create important and successful businesses for the long term. They focus on the emerging mobile marketplace, bringing the benefit of their track records and fresh perspective to partner with companies across the long arc of their growth – from inception to standalone, sustainable businesses.

Aspect Ventures

Founded in 2014, Vayner/RSE is a marriage of builders: Gary Vaynerchuk, VaynerMedia and RSE Ventures. VRSE invests in teams building tomorrow's companies through unique consumer insight and relentless drive.  Our sweet spot is in the first round of institutional financing, funding either as lead investors or as part of a syndicate. Beyond capital, we support our community with access and insights derived across both our investment portfolio and the operating companies we oversee on a daily basis.  Our team has a diverse background of starting, growing and operating companies across a variety of industries and life stages and we leverage this mental elasticity to help our entrepreneurs through the gamut of challenges that accompany building companies.

Vayner/RSE

Brand Foundry Ventures they invest in early-stage companies operating in the consumer and business sectors.

Brand Foundry Ventures

Over ten years, Brand Capital has partnered in the building of over 850+ indigenous brands. It has enabled the introduction of new concepts of print advertising in the form of jackets, panorama adverts and flaps, emulated across other print media. Since its inception, Brand capital has helped build several iconic brands and create immense enterprise value. But most of all, Brand Capital has enabled the discovery of ‘Brand value’. Different from an archetypal Private Equity player, we succeed in contributing ‘Intellectual Capital’, thus supporting the creation of a brand strategy and planning media-spread to optimize value. We now have investments across sectors as wide as – Retail, FMCG, Consumer Durables, Realty, Digital and Mobile, E-Retail, Health & Wellness, Financial Services, Consumer Services and several more. Our invested value today stands at USD 2.5 Billion, driven by our disruptive innovation and the power of the media properties across ''The Times Group''. - See more at: http://brandcapital.co.in/#sthash.YJ6lB0CB.dpuf

Brand Capital

TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. (the “Company”) is an externally managed, closed-end, non-diversified management investment company that has elected to be regulated as a business development company under the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended. It was formed to expand the venture growth stage business segment of its sponsor, TriplePoint Capital LLC (“TriplePoint Capital”). The Company’s investment objective is to maximize its total return to stockholders primarily in the form of current income and, to a lesser extent, capital appreciation by primarily lending with warrants to venture growth stage companies focused in technology, life sciences and other high growth industries backed by a select group of leading venture capital investors.

TriplePoint Venture Growth

Birchbox

Launched in 2010, Birchbox is the discovery commerce platform redefining the retail process by offering consumers a personalized way to discover, sample, shop, and learn about the best products and brands available.  Birchbox members have first-touch experiences with products each month and access to educational content to help them get the most out of their products.  Top brands like Kiehl’s, Benefit, Deborah Lippmann, and Stila have partnered with Birchbox.

Birchbox is a beauty subscription service that delivers personalized monthly boxes containing a mix of four to six sample and full-sized items of makeup, skincare, haircare, and fragrance products. Subscribers complete a web-based beauty profile to receive customized product selections tailored to their preferences and needs. The company allows subscribers to try high-end samples before committing to full-size purchases. Birchbox's online shop offers full-size versions of sampled products along with other beauty items.

The intersection of beauty and technology to deliver hyper-personalized products.

Beauty Tech

Birchbox makes improbable comeback from bankruptcy

Walgreens Boots Alliance

The multi-channel offering will bring prestige beauty brands into Walgreens stores and allow customers to discover and shop for new brands in an interactive and accessible way, and will include a curated Birchbox shop on Walgreens digital properties.

Birchbox is a beauty subscription service that delivers personalized monthly boxes containing a mix of four to six sample and full-sized items of makeup, skincare, haircare, and fragrance products. Subscribers complete a web-based beauty profile to receive customized product selections tailored to their preferences and needs. The company allows subscribers to try high-end samples before committing to full-size purchases. Birchbox's online shop offers full-size versions of sampled products along with other beauty items.Birchbox also operates physical retail stores in New York City and Paris. In 2015, the company developed its own in-house beauty brands named Love of Color and Arrow.&nbsp;In May 2023, the investment company Retention Brands acquired Birchbox’s assets from FemTech Health (a company that acquired Birchbox in 2021). As of July 2024, Birchbox offered monthly subscriptions starting at USD 19 for an annual plan, delivering a mix of samples and occasional full-size items across the makeup, skincare, haircare, and fragrance categories.

Ipsy provides a subscription-based personalized bundle of beauty products. It uses an online quiz to obtain customer attributes such as skin tone, hair color, and preferred brands and uses its proprietary machine learning technology named “IPSY MATCH” to match products from selected brands with customers.Ipsy provides three customized subscription-based product bundle options: 1) Glam Bag (five deluxe-sized samples for USD 14 per month); 2) BoxyCharm (five full-sized products for USD 30 per month); and 3)Icon Box (eight full-sized products for USD 60 per quarter). Ipsy also enables customers to pick three products out of 12 recommendations, allowing the company to gain insights on customer preferences which are in turn used to improve its recommendation engine.Ipsy ships to the US, Canada, and Mexico with over 3 million active members as of November 2020. As of October 2023, Ipsy had over 3.6 million followers on TikTok and was claimed to be the most followed beauty brand on the platform.In November 2020, Ipsy acquired the subscription-based beauty product provider BoxyCharm in a USD 500 million deal, and, in March 2023, merged the two brands under Ipsy’s brand portfolio.Key customers and partnershipsIpsy’s platform features various makeup brands from over 330 retailers (November 2023).Ipsy creates curated makeup boxes in partnership with celebrities and popular makeup artists such as the founder of the cosmetic brand Anastasia Beverly Hills, Anastasia Soare (March 2023), the American actress and singer, Vanessa Hudgens (July 2023), the british makeup artist, Pat McGrath (October 2023), and the American singer and songwriter, Gwen Stefani (February 2024).Key Competitors : None comparable (Ipsy is the only company in the hub that offers customized subscription boxes for an assortment of various types of beauty products.)

Ipsy

Proven Skincare develops personalized products based on a custom formula that incorporates 45 factors about the user including environment, lifestyle, and skin concerns. Based on the identified skin genome profile, three multifunctional products are developed, i.e. a multifunctional cleanser/toner, a moisturizer, and a night cream/serum. Proven Skincare products can be purchased as a one-off or on a subscription.Proven claims that its proprietary “Skin Genomic Database” consists of over 20 million customer testimonials, 8 million online reviews, and data from over 4,000 scientific papers analyzed with machine learning and natural-language processing to identify the most suitable clean ingredients for each customer.The company also introduced a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/10097?industryIds=39">personalized eye cream </a>duo for day and night use in May 2022. Proven's skincare personalization process received a US <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11478?industryIds=39">patent </a>in July 2022. It introduced a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24527">personalized Serum </a>in November 2023 which leverages AI to determine the optimal skincare ingredients for each user.Proven Skincare <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11716?industryIds=39">expanded </a>into the European Union (EU) and the UK in July 2022.Key customers and partnershipsThe company announced a partnership with Sephora in January 2023 to bring its personalized skincare solutions to <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16034">Sephora’s </a>digital and brick-and-mortar stores.As of September 2021, Proven Skincare had <a href="https://www.retaildive.com/news/how-high-is-the-ceiling-for-personalized-beauty-brands/606802/">over 100,000 customer </a>s, ~70% of which were repeat shoppers.Funding and financialsFrom its launch in October 2019, the company had reportedly reached a USD 24 million average annual revenue within two years of operation in the North American market, with 80% of customers on a subscription-based sales model.In September 2023, the company raised <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22322">USD 12.2 million </a>in series A funding led by NewH2 Ventures to enhance its brand presence and expand its team.

Proven Skincare

Function of Beauty is a developer of custom hair care, skincare, and body care products. The company initially focused on hair care and subsequently expanded its focus to skin and body care products in July 2020. Function of Beauty formulates custom products based on an online quiz using an algorithm capable of offering 12 billion custom combinations developed by the company’s founders—a group of MIT engineers and data scientists including Zahir Dossa and Joshua Maciejewski.The company’s products are vegan, cruelty-free, sulphate-free, gluten-free, and paraben-free. Its hair care products have a patented Adaptive f3 Bonding Complex. Function of Beauty’s customized products include shampoo and conditioner (starting at USD 20 as of January 2024), body wash and body lotion (starting at USD 21 as of January 2024) and moisturizer (starting at USD 45 as of January 2024).Function of Beauty carries out product designing, development, manufacturing, and packaging in-house with occasional consultant feedback. Function of Beauty uses automated processes, including a robotic system for order dispensing. The system can use 20–50 ingredients per bottle. As of January 2024, the company shipped to over 48 countries including the US, the UK, Canada, EU countries, and several Asian countries.In August 2021, Function of Beauty acquired Atolla, a custom skincare product developer to combine its proprietary formulations with Atolla's patented skincare technology to offer advanced custom skincare products.Key customers and partnershipsIn September 2022, the company partnered with Canadian retailer <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13191?industryIds=39">Shoppers Drug Mart </a>to launch its personalized hair care products in Canada. In August 2023, Function of Beauty launched a new Function of Beauty <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21500">PRO hair care range </a>in 300 Sephora locations across North America and online. It also has a wholesale partnership with Amazon (<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/30313">June 2024</a>) to offer hair care products through Amazon’s e-commerce platform.

Function of Beauty

Hawthorne is a developer of custom fragrance, body care/grooming, hair care, and skincare products for men. The company launched with fragrances, introduced body care products in 2018, hair care products in 2019, and in January 2020 introduced custom skincare products. An online quiz collects information such as daily routine, lifestyle, taste, and familiarity with grooming products. That information is then analyzed using a proprietary data processing algorithm.Hawthorne claims that the algorithm can match customers with a product that suits their body chemistry, skin type, hair type, and lifestyle with a 97% accuracy. As of January 2024, the company’s personalized fragrances were priced at USD 50–60 and skin and hair care products were priced at USD 17–21. The company ships to the US, Hawaii, and Alaska.Key customers and partnershipsHawthorne’s perfumes are developed in collaboration with award-winning perfumers such as Rodrigo Flores-Roux, Olivier Gillotin, and Quentin Bisch.

Hawthorne

Prose develops custom hair care products and hair care routines based on responses to an online quiz. The quiz obtains customer information about hair type, current hair care habits, diet, stress level, physical activity and factors such as ultraviolet (UV) exposure, pollution, humidity, wind, and other <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9356?industryIds=39">micro-local factors </a>. The quiz also takes customer’s preferences such as vegan or gluten-free requirements into consideration. The information is processed through Prose’s proprietary algorithm to create individualized products. Prose uses a semi-automated approach to manufacturing where the production is carried out by a chemist with the aid of automated mixing and packaging.In April 2021, the company introduced “Root Source,” a hair supplement to treat environmental causes of hair loss. The product consists of two pills, a universal soft gel and a customized capsule, and, as of January 2024, was priced at USD 57.2. The product was developed based on insights derived from information collected through Prose’s online quiz, which revealed that around 85% of the brand’s customers experience hair loss. Root Source’s clinical trials claim around 93% of users experiencing improved hair growth after taking the supplement for 90 days. Prose also introduced a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/12245?industryIds=39">personalized styling gel </a>specifically targeting curly hair in August 2022.In June 2023, Prose expanded into <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19873">skincare </a>with an AI-powered system offering customized formulas based on individual needs, targeting multiple skin concerns, and addressing factors such as skin type, diet, stress, pollution, and climate while allowing fragrance and texture customization. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/28430">April 2024 </a>, the company launched an AI-based beauty tech customization platform, Singular. The company claims to have completed over one million consultations in the 11 months leading up to November 2019.

Prose

Companies that leverage technologies such as AI/ML and AR/VR  to enable cosmetic producers to offer personalized product offerings to consumers. This could include virtual-try-ons for cosmetics such as makeup and hair color in addition to solutions for skin analytics.

Companies that formulate customized solutions for skin, leveraging technologies such as AI/ML to conduct skin analysis, and provide personalized recommendations, which are directly sold to consumers.

Companies that leverage biotechnology, nanotechnology, or other technologies to develop biomaterials or novel lab-grown ingredients (e.g., bio-based cosmetic polymers) for use by the broader beauty industry.

Companies that leverage technologies like IoT to develop smart devices (e.g., smart mirrors, wearables) that offer real-time analysis of skin health, skincare routines, and product usage for consumers. This also includes companies that offer 3D-printed makeup, at-home beauty tech (e.g., at-home manicure machines), and other tech-based personal care products (e.g., tech-enabled color-changing nails).

Companies that leverage technologies such as AI/ML to match consumers with third-party beauty products by offering personalized recommendations to consumers, which are curated based on each individual customer’s preferences.

Companies that formulate customized hair and other beauty solutions such as fragrances, leveraging technologies such as AI/ML to tailor product recommendations, which are directly sold to consumers.

Beauty tech features brands that leverage IoT for smart devices

Personalized beauty tech features brands that leverage AR tools for virtual cosmetic try-ons

Some companies (like Mink and Ellure) allow customers to print their own makeup

Beauty tech features brands that leverage robotics for at-home devices

AI/ML is used for Big Data analysis, allowing companies to improve prediction capabilities for personalization

Beauty tech features brands that leverage biotechnology to create sustainable materials

Beauty tech features brands that leverage blockchain for supply chain transparency

Companies offer personalized recommendations and products based on individual attributes like skin and hair

Birchbox

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