PARIS – L’Oréal has participated in a 35-million-euro funding round for French biotech company Abolis Biotechnologies in the quest to create purpose-made, sustainable ingredients produced at scale.
The minority investment was made through Business Opportunities for L’Oréal Development, or BOLD, the group’s venture capital fund. The deal is part of a three-way partnership. Evonik CVC, a global specialty manufacturer that’s a long-standing partner of L’Oréal, has also taken a minority share in Abolis, while other investors include Deep Tech & Climate Fund, Clay Partners, Icos Capital and Liberset.
L’Oréal, Abolis and Evonik will together aim to discover, develop and manufacture innovative, sustainable ingredients for beauty products and more.
For L’Oréal, the tie-in is meant to help step up the company’s sustainability commitment, a key part of its strategy for 2030, called L’Oréal for the Future. That includes a heightened focus on bio-based ingredients for its formulas.
“By mobilizing our respective companies’ research, innovation and manufacturing capabilities and expertise, we are building an end-to-end value chain that we believe has tremendous potential to be a game-changer in bio-based ingredients for beauty,” said Barbara Lavernos, deputy chief executive officer in charge of research, innovation and technology at L’Oréal, in a statement, of the triumvirate.
“We’re going to embrace all the key elements of the value chain to bring science and biotechnology to life,” continued Frédéric Legrand, who heads up the international innovative ingredients department, L’Oréal R&I, in an interview. “Each of the partners will come with its own expertise to make this happen with a common ambition.”
Science is at the core of L’Oréal’s model, said Legrand. The group has 4,000 researchers in multiple disciplines and 20 research centers in 11 countries worldwide. The company invests more than 1 billion euros in research and innovation yearly.
“Green sciences are a lever for us to achieve the [L’Oréal for the Future] ambition. Biotechnologies are at the core of this strategy,” said Legrand, adding they can enable the group to develop both green alternative ingredients for the company’s portfolio and to rethink completely the production model for ingredients. Concurrently, biotechnology enables L’Oréal to push the boundaries of ingredient territories it can reach to achieve the goal of creating beauty that moves the world while respecting planet Earth.
Green sciences are a lever for L’Oréal to reach its sustainability goals.
“Open innovation is at the core of our strategy — especially when you talk about biotechnologies,” continued Legrand, describing that as a wide territory for sustainable innovation.
To wit: L’Oréal has launched the L’Oréal Green Sciences Incubator for start-ups, partnered with Dutch biotech concern Micreos and invested in companies such as Microphyt and Debut Bio, among many others.
Abolis, based in a biocluster called Genopole, in évry-Courcouronnes, France, has collaborated with L’Oréal since 2019, including on an extended lab set up three years later.
Abolis has an expertise in made-to-measure industrial solutions based on microorganisms for cosmetics, health care and nutrition, among other industries. Together with L’Oréal, it has been working to develop not only new ingredients to offer sustainable alternatives to the group’s current portfolio of raw materials, but also to open different areas of innovation that today are not accessible through traditional chemistry.
“Our ambition as a tripartite [grouping] is really to be as broad as possible in terms of application,” said Legrand. That includes biological actives for skin, scalp or hair care, for instance.
“This is where we push the boundaries in terms of performance,” he said. “But not only, the beauty of biotechnology is that you can also reach a range of molecules — raw materials that we call functional ingredients — that are also very important for beauty.”
Those can positively impact on the likes of product sensoriality.
Abolis made the fundraise for three main reasons — to scale, especially its operations and commercial activity worldwide; to start developing proprietary processes, and to grow its microbiome studio business unit with applications such as nutrition, health and skin care, and biocontrol.
Abolis’ successful collaboration with L’Oréal already spans several projects.
“With this new tripartite agreement with Evonik, we really want to go even one step further with more products and ingredients to be jointly developed by L’Oréal, Evonik and ourselves,” said Cyrille Pauthenier, CEO of Abolis, who explained his company comes to play, for example, when a molecule is too complex to be created chemically or has to be rejuvenated with a bio-based, sustainable alternative.
“We take the molecule and transform it into something that can be a viable at-scale production process,” he said, adding the beauty of collaborating with Evonik is its ability to scale up chemical engineering, industrialization, production and distribution of sustainable solutions. It is already a major provider to L’Oréal.
Some molecules produced will be exclusive to L’Oréal and others will be for broader use. An important active in the cosmetics space might be used in food supplements and animal feed, for example.
Pauthenier sees significant opportunities for biotech ingredients.
“There is a lot more to do,” he said, explaining the possibilities stretch wide — past skin care. “That’s obvious. But there are things in colors for hair and makeup, for instance…that can have tremendous positive impact on the final product.”
Pauthenier lauded L’Oréal for its “strong, transformative drive” being brought to the ingredient industry at large.
