041 - What I'm Reading: Week of April 29th
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 Links in this newsletter route back to my blog or directly to the original content.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
💭 This week’s big news…aside from Elon Musk and Twitter has been Indonesia’s ever widening ban on the export of palm oil. If you thought inflation and supply chain problems were bad…this is a new level of 🤦 ouch considering most of our grocery store, mass, and prestige items have palm oil in them. Every few years activist groups protest palm oil production due to the less than friendly environmental practices, and while farming practices may have improved there are real sustainable synthetic solutions out there with far better environmental footprints. Perhaps, this ban will force some new thinking and a reconsideration of more costly synthetic, but greener and more reliable solutions.
This week: a second life for up-cycled masks in cement, a single pill contraceptive for pre or post use, your gut’s influence on food preference, the missed opportunity of trackers for medical use in the underrepresented, controversial findings for intermittent fasting, an epigenetic explanation for miscarriages, a new baby brand, and much more.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
The first five startups in Amazon’s new industrial innovation fund. This includes companies in robotics, supply chain management, and safety.
The 15 startups at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable accelerator demo day.
Snap is growing faster than both Meta and Twitter, with steadily increasing revenue.
🌴 🇮🇩 Concerns over the larger implications of Indonesia’s ban on palm oil exports. This also raises the larger 🚩 flag over the need to shift to palm alternatives, even better sustainable alternatives (see C16 biosciences)…this is not a new problem, there is little incentive to change due to cost.
NPD reported a rise in prestige make-up and hair sales, and body care is growing at a faster rate than skincare.
😁 Just for fun:
🍊Tropicana is releasing a cereal meant to be eaten with orange juice.
🧸 The Hustle: The evolution of the gummy bear.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
🇮🇳 India’s Earth Rhythm, a personal care brand, raised $8M in funding to expand into physical retail beyond D2C with the backing of Nykaa.
🇦🇺 AllKinds the self care line for kids and teens from Australia.
⭐️ Galderma X Sol-Gel announced they received FDA approval for EPSOLAY for treatment of rosacea lesions. The technology is described as “The benzoyl peroxide in EPSOLAY is encapsulated within silica-based patented microcapsules. The silica-based shell is designed to slowly release benzoyl peroxide over time to provide a favorable efficacy and safety profile.”
👶 Soapbox launched a new refillable baby care line called goodnest. They have three main products - a 3-in-1 bodywash tablet to be dissolved in a bottle (like Blueland), a stick moisturizer, and dissolvable soap sheets. Here is more on the brand and their plans.
👩🦱 Hair:
A look at Madison Reed’s retail expansion plans.
🦷 Oral Care:
Twice, Lenny Kravitz’s oral care startup, launched an ‘oral wellness immunity rinse.” It is an interesting twist on old fashioned mouthwash.
💊 Supplements:
Swedish Collagen, an ingestible collagen beauty brand, from Swedish Nutra. The brand sells three different collagen formulas including a vegan one, which uses amino acids in liquid form with a high proportion of the amino acids L-Glycine, L-Alanine and L-Glutamine.
Root’d, founded by Adams Chimera, is the first sugar free hydration powder with full spectrum vitamins.
Calm Day, owned by LifeForm, is a supplement designed to reduce stress
and improve mood.
Fizzique recently reformulated their sparkling water whey protein beverage.
🛍 Retail:
Glossy looks at how Yamibuy became the largest e-commerce destination for Asian products selling products from China, Japan, & Korea including beauty.
MARKET is Verb’s new shoppable live streaming social commerce platform allowing for more interactive streaming events. Wander beauty announced they will be hosting a shopping event on this platform.
Meta is opening a physical store to help sell products for the metaverse.
♻️ Sustainable Design:
Higg the sustainability insights software provider helping to track supply chain performance data, from materials to products, facilities to stores, emissions to working conditions raised $50M to expand its offering into the consumer goods space including automotive, outdoor and toys.
Earthly Co., is a sustainable home-care brand sold through Amazon, specializing in reusable paper towels.
⭐️ 😷 Washington State’s engineering department published findings for a new way to put all of the surgical masks we have been using and disposing of to good use. Apparently the fibers from these masks when mixed with cement, can make cement “47% stronger than commonly used cement after a month of curing”. This method is also being explored for the up-cycling of common microfibers found in clothing. Now we need a way to commercialize this process.
👩🔬 Femtech:
Pitchbook: As more VC money floods into fertility, some startups are feeling left out.
Despite this news, a few fertility focused startups received Seed funding this week including: Apryl (a fertility benefits platform raised $4.3M) and Frame Fertility (another fertility benefits platform raised $2.8M).
⭐️ Researchers identified a new drug combination that could be used as a pre or post contraceptive.
Bloom from Sword Health is a new virtual pelvic health provider solution.
LadyBeehive, a feminine care brand from founder Sakinatou Traore, based on traditions from Burkina Faso.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
🇸🇬 HealthBeats, a Singapore based startup raised $3M in Seed stage funding for their connecting health monitoring solutions, allowing health practitioners to monitor blood sugar, blood pressure, and COVID signals (temperature and blood oxygen saturation) at speed.
⭐️ ⌚️ A new study conducted by the All of Us program, an initiative of the NIH found wearable trackers to be too expensive for groups underrepresented in medical research. Cost and language were the highest barriers to entry.
The founder of Pebble, the first smartwatch, reflects on why it failed.
🇩🇪 🦾 A team out of Germany developed sensors for electronic skin, capable of sensing directional touch, an important step forward for robot-to-robot interaction or robot-to-human interaction.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs...:
Amyris, the biotech company with brands like Bioassance, JVN, & Pipette, acquired Naomi Watts’ Onda Beauty. Onda Beauty is a clean beauty retailer. This is the company’s first retail acquisition, already covering the areas of ingredient manufacturer/supplier & brand creator.
👩🦱 Helen of Troy acquired Curlsmith for a reported $150M.
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ Research out of the University of Pittsburgh shows for the first time the ability of the gut microbiome to influence food preference.
Last week The New England Journal of Medicine, published a year long study showing time restriction offered no benefit for losing weight. Over the past few years, time restriction or ‘intermittent fasting’ has taken off as a healthy way to control weight, yet there were no long-term official studies to back or counter these beliefs. Not surprisingly, there is already some worthy criticism of the study design.
Epigenetics
🧠 A new study linked epigenetic age, examining DNA methylation of certain genes, to cognitive function. Finding, “Accelerated epigenetic age in midlife was predictive of cognitive performance five to ten years later”.
⭐️ 🇯🇵 New research conducted on mice, out of Japan, provides an epigenetic (transgenerational gene expression) reason for miscarriage and a potential solution.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ Chiratae Ventures: Consumer Tech Report 2022. A look at the evolution of consumer tech in India, key categories for growth, and where they sit in the global landscape.
⭐️ DMG Ventures: What’s next for mass-market consumer marketplaces?
Asia Cosme Lab: Whitening & Protection Report - featuring new product launches across Asia in the UV and brightening space.
🧼 The Hustle: The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap.
Crunchbase: The Rise of the Seed Round.
Visual Capitalist: Visualizing Companies with the Most Patents Granted in 2021.
💡Enjoy,
-Anne