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Check out the pitch deck cosmetic startup The Good Face Project used to raise $5.65 million from investors like the cofounder of GoFundMe
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- Cosmetic startup The Good Face Project raised $5.65 million in seed funding, led by VMG Catalyst.
- Other investors include industry execs from Summer Fridays, The Detox Market, and GoFundMe.
- The startup’s main product is a catalog of over 150,000 different cosmetic ingredients.
The beauty industry has exploded into a massive $534 billion space in 2022, with new products released every day promising clearer, wrinkle-free skin or flawless makeup application.
So Iva Teixeira was surprised to discover how brands and manufacturers developed and recorded the formulas for these “cutting-edge” products: Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Outlook folder systems, and even Slack messages.
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In response, Teixeira and her cofounder, Lena Skliarova-Mordvinova, created The Good Face Project to provide brands, manufacturers, and consumers with an automated and comprehensive way to build and evaluate cosmetic formulas. In August, the startup announced a $5.65 million seed round led by VMG Catalyst.
The startup’s main product, the Good Face Formulator, is a catalog of over 150,000 different ingredients, connected together by algorithms showing the relationships between different compounds. Chemists can see, for example, which ingredients work well together or cause allergic reactions when mixed. Brands and manufacturers are then able to use the product as a virtual laboratory where they can combine different compounds and optimize formulas for efficacy.
The Good Face Formulator also provides regulatory guidance, alerting users to ingredient bans by countries or other compliance issues.
Teixera says that the startup responds not only to outdated approaches in the beauty industry, but also to requests from consumers for more transparency.
“This originated really from the consumer conquering the food industry,” Teixera said. “We all want it to be locally grown, we want to know exactly where it’s coming from. Millennials were like, ‘okay we know how to do this now for food, but how about the stuff we put on our bodies and skin?'”
The Good Face Project also offers consumer product testing, ecommerce tools, and an index of “clean” brands.
The startup’s $5.65 million seed round was led by VMG Catalyst, with participation from investors like Spark Growth Ventures, REDO Ventures, and Capsum, and industry executives such as the CEO of Summer Fridays, the founder and CEO of The Detox Market, and the cofounder of GoFundMe. The Good Face Project has raised approximately $8 million in total funding so far.
The startup plans on using the seed funding to scale revenue and internal headcount, Teixera said, and even aims to someday enter other verticals centered around creating complex chemical products, such as agriculture.
Against the backdrop of the successful funding round, Teixera acknowledges that her team still faces obstacles outside of the typical ones startups encounter, as the company has many Ukrainian employees affected by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including cofounder Skliarova-Mordvinova.
“Now we have the added mission of succeeding, not just for the sake of the industry and because we are two women that are here to bring better technology, but also because we have a team in Ukraine that needs us to succeed and to be a financially viable company,” Teixera said. “That’s our latest rallying cry.”
Here’s a look at the 11-page pitch deck The Good Face Project used to raise $5.65 million in seed funding.
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