Biotech beauty company Debut has secured $20 million in investment to enhance its AI-driven ingredient discovery platform and expand its formulation business in Asia.
The San Diego-based biotech start-up’s fundraising round was supported by Fine Structure Ventures, EDBI, Wealthberry, L’Oréal, GS Futures, Sandbox Industries and Material Impact, among others. To date, Debut has raised $85 million.
The latest fundraising round will be used to advance skin longevity innovation and scale its formulation business in the U.S. and Asia.
For ingredient discovery, it is focusing on the next-generation ingredients that target the 14 hallmarks of aging.
“Debut is laser-focused on staying at the forefront of skin care innovation and bringing cutting-edge biotech to every beauty brand with the highest-performing and most differentiated ingredients,” said Joshua Britton, founder and chief executive officer of Debut.
He is particularly interested in longevity, the latest beauty buzzword: “The antiaging slogan has gone away. It’s all skin longevity. The problem with that is that to go after skin longevity, you have to address these 44 marks of skin aging and currently there are little ingredients that actually do that. So that’s where our work becomes vital. We have to understand the science. We have to produce the ingredients. These ingredients will be new. It requires us screening 50 billion of them to find the right ones. But once we have them, then it will power all brands.”
At the same time, the company is poised to enter the Asian market, starting with Singapore where the company will be partnering with leading brands to create custom ingredients and formulations for longevity skin care.
“AI combined with an understanding of skin biology enables the creation of custom formulation solutions for different geographies that has previously not been possible,” Britton said.
In addition to ingredient discovery, Debut started dipping its toes into the contract manufacturing business last July, with the goal of bringing biotech ingredients to the masses.
That same month, it signed an agreement with L’Oréal to develop more than a dozen bio-identical ingredients that will replace conventionally sourced ingredients currently used in L’Oréal global beauty and personal care brands across skin, hair, color cosmetics and fragrance. This was the first big joint announcement from the two companies since the beauty giant led a $40 million round of series B funding in the firm through its venture arm Bold in June 2023.
In addition to its contract manufacturing business, it launched its own skin care brand Deinde in January 2024.
“It’s doing really well. It’s on track again to meet or exceed its targets this year,” Britton said.
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