ATLANTA, Jan. 10, 2024 — This January beauty-tech company, MYAVANA, founded by black female tech entrepreneur, Candace Mitchell Harris, announces a new retail partnership with retailer Ulta Beauty, along with two strategic investments from Prisma Ventures and the BrainTrust Fund.
Prisma Ventures, Ulta Beauty’s Digital Innovation Fund, made a strategic investment in MYAVANA to support the company’s hair care retail innovation within the beauty industry. Shaping the future of retail by empowering tomorrow’s visionaries and providing early-stage startups and emerging tech entrepreneurs access to capital and resources, Prisma Ventures helps to unlock beautiful possibilities for disruptive, omnichannel experiences. As part of this partnership MYAVANA will provide their advanced HairAI™ hair analysis technology, while both Ulta Beauty and MYAVANA will explore the co-development of AI powered hair technologies for future retail innovation.
“Through Prisma Ventures, Ulta Beauty’s digital innovation fund, we’re always looking to support and invest in technologies that will pave the path forward for the world of beauty – especially those with like-minded values aiming to innovate the space through an inclusive lens,” said Agustina Sartori, Senior Director of Digital Innovation at Ulta Beauty & Managing Director of Prisma Ventures, “Candace’s visionary approach to digitizing beauty experiences for all hair types, including textured hair, is incredibly unique, and we’re thrilled to collaborate with MYAVANA on their mission to open new doors for more guests through hair analysis technology.”
Additionally, BrainTrust Fund, which invests in breakthrough brands led by at least one Black founder that serves the majority, also made a strategic investment in MYAVANA alongside Prisma Ventures. The funds will go towards their enterprise retail expansion, including salon channels and global product distribution leveraging the company’s consumer intelligence across the hair industry. “Myavana is emerging as a leader in beauty AI because its hair strand analysis super-serves every customer in this valuable marketplace, from the shopper seeking a personalized diagnosis, to retailers and stylists wanting to sell the right products to shoppers the first time,” say BrainTrust Fund General Partners Kendra Bracken-Ferguson and Lisa Stone. “We’re looking forward to working with Candace and her team as the brand continues to accelerate.”
Rolling out through the first fiscal quarter of 2024, Ulta Beauty will integrate MYAVANA’s HairAI technology within their e-commerce try-on experiences to power personalized product recommendations based on instant hair type analysis of their guests.
“In the beginning at MYAVANA, we set out on a mission to transform the hair industry through science and technology and I am ecstatic to partner with Ulta Beauty to begin this digital transformation in retail. Through our personalized hair care technology that will innovate and elevate our shopping experiences, we’re excited to bring to market better identification and understanding of our unique hair strands and unique hair journeys while partnering with the nation’s largest beauty retailer that prioritizes innovation and inclusion” says Candace Harris, CEO & Founder of MYAVANA.
Candace Harris founded MYAVANA in 2012, leveraging 17 years of experience in computer science to develop AI haircare technology that analyzes the variables of hair strands and hair products to produce personalized hair care plans that support healthy hair and hair growth. She is a pioneer within a space that is overwhelmingly homogenous and non-inclusive, carving out solutions for BIPOC women, a group often ignored.
About MYAVANA
MYAVANA is a Black female-owned, and operated beauty tech company backed by over a decade of research, development and data. MYAVANA is disrupting the multi-billion dollar, textured hair care market as a pioneer of HairAI™ (Artificial Intelligence Hair Strand Analysis) technology and HairSI™ (Scientific Hair Strand Analysis). MYAVANA Labs has analyzed over two billion hair strands, making it the world’s largest database of textured hair care data. MYAVANA couples its personalized, scientific hair analysis with the company’s prescriptive, data-driven hair product recommendation suite of over 3000 commercially available hair products on the market. All product recommendations have been performance tested and validated by MYAVANA for effectiveness on textured hair types and conditions. The MYAVANA suite of products forms a transformational hair care solution for consumers and an elevated data driven service as well as retail opportunity for industry professionals.
By partnering with MYAVANA’s Consumer Intelligence Data Insights, Hair Product Manufacturers can gain insights into textured hair conditions to inform product development needs. As a B2C and B2B solution, MYAVANA’s Personalized Consumer Intelligence Data is poised to radically change how hair product purchasing decisions are made by consumers – through data personalization, and illuminate the massive data validated opportunity for more targeted textured hair relevant products and solutions by the hair care industry. With MYAVANA’s Recommendation Intelligence, Retailers can license the hair analysis technology to offer personalized hair product recommendations to shoppers online and in-store.
MYAVANA will become a force multiplier for 5th generation technology jobs creation in the beauty space – where some AI tech is predicted to replace traditional jobs like in customer service, tech support, accounting, manufacturing, etc.
About the founder
Candace Harris founded MYAVANA in beta in 2012 researching and developing proprietary AI hair care technology that analyzes the variables of hair strands and hair products to produce personalized hair care plans that support healthy hair and hair growth. As a graduate of Georgia Tech, she brings over 17 years of experience in computer science to MYAVANA. Candace is the 2023 BeautyMatters Innovator of the Year, Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, WWD Top 50 Beauty Innovator, BET Honors STEM Award winner, Sephora Accelerate fellow, and recent Georgia Tech Computing Hall of Fame inductee. Candace’s work has been featured nationally on CNN, Marie Claire, ESSENCE, Inc. Magazine, Black Enterprise, Business Insider, and more.
For more information, visit MYAVANA.com or follow @MYAVANAHairCare
Media contact: For media inquiries email [email protected]
SOURCE MYAVANA
