The Good Face Project Closes $5.65 Million to Empower Cosmetic Chemists with Ingredient Transparency in the Beauty Industry

The AI-driven platform enables brands, manufacturers, and Fortune 50 global retailers to meet consumer demands for safe, effective, and sustainable beauty products

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Good Face Project, the innovation platform for the next generation of beauty, today announced a $5.65 million seed investment round led by VMG Catalyst to infuse scientific ingredient-level data and insights into the Research and Development and innovation cycle for cosmetics.

The participating investors include Spark Growth Ventures, REDO Ventures, Capsum, and influential industry executives including John Heffner (CEO, Summer Fridays and former CEO, Drybar), Romain Gaillard (Founder and CEO, The Detox Market), as well as Andy Ballester (Co-Founder, GoFundMe). Brooke Kiley, Partner at VMG Catalyst and Hem Suri, Founding Partner at Spark Growth Ventures, will be joining the board as director and board observer, respectively, as part of this raise.

The Good Face Project is a data and technology company focused on creating efficiencies and transparency in the development of personal care products. It has built the world's largest centralized International Nomenclature Cosmetic Ingredient (INCI) level database which encompasses up-to-date scientific research, as well as worldwide regulatory and sustainability parameters. Its cloud-based platform, the Good Face Formulator, enables efficacious product creation and formulation based on the latest science, while also allowing brands and manufacturers to easily grade their formulations against worldwide regulatory compliance requirements. The new funding will be used to expand the product experience, accelerate customer adoption, and scale the team.

"We think of our platform as an R&D lab in the cloud," said Iva Teixeira, Co-Founder and CEO of The Good Face Project. "The Good Face Project is transforming the way brands, manufacturers and ingredient suppliers approach research and development, and giving them confidence that their new formulas will include thoughtfully sourced ingredients and meet regulatory requirements, while also satisfying consumer demand for transparency, safety, and sustainability. We're excited and grateful for this new financing which we will put to use in empowering best in class beauty innovation and formulation."

Meeting beauty regulations is challenging. There are over 150 consumer certifications, more than 6,500 geographic regulations and 3,200 unique retailer standards to follow today. The Good Face Formulator was developed by a team of data scientists, chemists and toxicologists to help brands and manufacturers meet this challenge by automating the research and development process. The Formulator draws on a vast ontology of over 150,000 ingredients and 200,000 in market formulas, and considers more than 40 dimensions of ingredient safety, sustainability and efficacy – so brands like Hero Cosmetics, Vegamour, and SolaWave can shrink time to market while increasing formula compliance.

"The Good Face Project is playing a critical role in helping brands and manufacturers drive efficiencies in their innovation and product development process," said Brooke Kiley, Partner at VMG Catalyst. "We were immediately impressed by Iva Teixeira and Lena Skilarova-Mordvinova and the technology they've built. We're excited to see the positive impact that The Good Face Project will have by bringing transparency and sustainability to the beauty industry."

The Good Face Project's customers include popular brands like The Honey Pot Company and Amika, manufacturers like Best Formulations and Dynamic Blending, retailers like Target and CosBar, and well-known global Fortune 50 Cosmetics companies. While the business focus today is cosmetics and personal care, The Good Face Project's core AI-powered, science-backed technology is capable of tackling formula design and optimization in any vertical, thus positioning the company as an industry-agnostic chemistry informatics platform targeting a collective market of over $1 trillion.

The Good Face Project is a chemistry informatics company which focuses on scientific formula design, evaluation, and optimization. The company was created by Ukrainian data scientist, Lena Skliarova-Mordvinova, and Bulgarian-born technologist, Iva Yovchev Teixeira, with the mission to empower chemical product innovators with real-time scientific data, so that they can create formulas that deliver performance, while safeguarding human health and the environment. Cosmetics is the first vertical to benefit from the AI algorithms engineered by the two female founders. The Good Face Formulator, a cloud-based Cosmetics formulation and regulatory platform, ushers in a new era of R&D speed, precision, transparency and sustainability for the Beauty industry. For more information, visit TheGoodFaceProject.com and follow The Good Face Project on Linkedin.

VMG Catalyst is a venture capital firm that invests in technology that supports consumer businesses. The firm believes that innovative software and technically advanced supply chains will be the differentiating factor behind the next generation of iconic brands and retailers. VMG Catalyst leverages its access to the consumer ecosystem through the VMG Partners franchise, which was founded in 2005, to identify acute pain points and help software founders prioritize their product roadmaps. VMG's large network and strong track record of scaling consumer brands provide the Catalyst team with a unique investment perspective grounded in industry experience and allow them to facilitate connections between brands, retailers, and emerging technology companies. For more information, visit VMG Catalyst.

SOURCE The Good Face Project