L’Oréal and Founders Factory, a London-based global digital accelerator and incubator, have announced their selection of startups for the second edition of their joint beauty tech accelerator program.

 

With its focus on digital leadership in beauty, L’Oréal has selected three new startups to incubate and support during a six-month accelerator program in partnership with digital accelerator, Founders Factory. Two of the startups, Sampler and Riviter, are new to the program. Alegra is an existing startup within the Founders Factory portfolio that L’Oréal will also be supporting.

“We are seeing a proliferation of startups within the Artificial Intelligence and deep learning space. This year was the rise of Augmented Reality,” said Henry Lane Fox, CEO and Co-Founder of Founders Factory. “Specifically within beauty, the big trend we see is the emergence of flash brands, companies who are using detailed data acquired from social media to understand very, very current trends in the market.”

Here are the startups that have been selected for the second round of the L’Oréal/Founders Factory accelerator program:

Sampler
(www.sampler.io)

Company premise: Sampler helps brands manage and measure their product sampling strategies through a more effective and targeted approach, merging offline product sampling with real-time digital insights. Consumers are able to receive samples personalized to their needs. After answering a few questions, they receive a list with samples tailored to their needs, and opt in on every sample that they receive at home. Sampler’s mission is to deliver more targeted and measurable product sampling campaigns that bring better ROI for brands.
Founder: Marie Chevrier in Canada. From her apartment in 2013, Marie began developing a way for brands to reach consumers and manage their product sampling efforts digitally. Sampler now has a team of 18 with more than 200 clients.

Riviter (www.riviter.com)
Company premise: Riviter has developed a visual search engine that uses patented AI technology to recognize products in images and matches them to products online, detecting both precise location and detailed attributes of the products. This means that Riviter can take any product or item and recognize what it is, where it comes from, things that are important about it, and then use that information to make recommendations and understand insights. For example, if a product on Pinterest leads to a broken link, Riviter finds where to get the product or something similar. The startup also helps brands eliminate lost sales from stockouts, suggesting products that deliver on what the customer is looking for.

Founder: Created by Andi Hadisutjipto, Kris Woodbeck, and Rachel Chen in the US.

Alegra (multiscreen.technology)

Company premise: Alegra is an existing startup within the Founders Factor accelerator program. The startup helps brands build digital online platforms for content and e-commerce simultaneously on multi devices. Using an automation system, it can build multi-device platforms, including mobile, tablet and web, instantly. For example, Alegra enables brands to expand their e-commerce business to five devices in just one minute using Alegra’s cloud platform.

Founder: Before founding Alegra, Alp Ocal, based in Turkey, worked as a computer engineer for 11 years in the corporate world, building multi-screen platforms for e-commerce and media companies. The startup now has offices in London and Turkey.