IRI-Sys exhibited for the first time last week at Cosmoprof Miami and the interest from attendees and fellow exhibitors was far greater than expected!

Massive thanks to everyone who came by our booth to learn more about our product, mission, and vision at IRI-Sys. Seeing the excitement from people in-person was tremendously gratifying and served as further encouragement that what we’re building @ IRI-Sys matters for the beauty industry.

Interestingly, two questions kept coming up while chatting with folks at Cosmoprof and I wanted to dive a little deeper into those questions and our answers in this week’s Beauty Bytes:

Our mission at IRI-Sys is to amplify the impact of each person in the beauty industry. This dictates how we approach the development of new AI-enabled features in IRI-Sys. We target key workflows that are currently manual and/or tedious for brands, manufacturers or consultants. 

A great example of this is the tedious process of compliance screening for formulas which we solved with our compliance agent named Regi.

The typical regulatory review was unnecessarily tedious: looking up ingredient regulations for each market you’re selling in, then analyzing the formula to see whether it complies with the regulations. Depending on the company, it could take anywhere from a day to several weeks!

With Regi, this entire process is automated: drag and drop a formula, get a compliance analysis for every market within a minute. This frees up regulatory professionals to tackle the high value, creative work of making necessary revisions to the formula based on Regi’s feedback. 

Regi also allows companies to radically change their approach to compliance. From the very first draft of a formula, they can run regular compliance screenings so that by the time the formula is finalized, there are no regulatory surprises. This simply was not possible to do 2 years ago.

Just as important to mention is how we’re not using AI at IRI-Sys. We completely avoid creating AI tools to replace or automate away the creative, high-value work that humans do. I personally believe the human ingenuity behind developing a cosmetic brand/manufacturer is a necessary feature, not a flaw.

ChatGPT for personal use versus business use are two completely different ballgames.

Say I wanted to create an affordable and lightweight facial moisturizer to be sold in the US, Canada and Europe. I asked ChatGPT to give me a formula and this is what I got:

At first glance this looks pretty good! Unfortunately, that’s the key risk with using AI tools for business without for the wrong use cases without proper guardrails. LLMs are excellent at producing outputs that look ‘correct’ but in reality are riddled with errors.

This is harmless if you’re asking ChatGPT what cities to visit in Italy for vacation, but absolutely unacceptable in business settings.

My favorite term to describe this output is AI slop. It is low quality content that lacks effort, depth and originality but dressed up to look correct.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but that’s why our approach to using AI works. We automate the menial, auxiliary tasks with high reliability so that people can spend more time creating original, high quality products. 

From our experience, the best adoption of AI happens when business processes are translated into high action, repeatable workflows that use agentic reasoning combined deterministic logic. In other words, people use AI tools best when the software tackle tasks that are repetitive, error prone and time consuming. The software needs to demonstrate excellent reliability, while keeping humans in the loop on its decision making and reasoning. 

This year we will see more and more cosmetic businesses start using AI-enabled tools the right way and to realize massive efficiency gains. I’m personally very excited to see how people rewire their operations to harness the undisputed benefits of this new age to technology brings.

Let me know your thoughts on this article!

It is becoming quite clear that, barring any major macro-economic disturbances, 2026 will be a year of historic dealmaking, and the beauty industry is no exception. In the overall market, there is pent-up demand for IPOs, and while most of the headlines are being grabbed by the SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic race to go public, this also opens a viable path for smaller companies to tap into market liquidity. This, in turn, allows investors to take more niche bets (see Cavu’s new fund below) when their exit options become more numerous.

It is no longer the case that only large legacy strategics like Unilever, L’Oreal, etc. can acquire successful brands; they can now turn to the public market more easily or create platforms (see the last edition of Beauty Bytes for the news on Yellowwood Partners merging Suave and Elida to create Evermark) of multiple winners under one umbrella. Investors love optionality.

I am excited to keep tabs on the market for you and have a feeling that 2026 will be one for the history books! Let’s dive in:

As previously reported in Beauty Bytes, after Bain Capital's takeover bid a few weeks ago, they have agreed to acquire Japanese personal-care group FineToday Holdings, owner of Tsubaki shampoo and men’s brand Uno, for about ¥200 billion (roughly $1.29 billion), per Nikkei. For the beauty world, it is a strong signal that mass and masstige J-beauty hair and skin care in Asia still have serious runway. FineToday already sells across 11 Asian markets, with China, Japan and Southeast Asia as key pillars. Under Bain, the company is expected to push harder on distribution, use Bain’s retail relationships in Japan for better shelf space, and keep funding R&D and new higher end hair launches. The deal also pauses FineToday’s IPO ambitions and sets it up for a longer private build, which could mean a cleaner brand story and a more global platform if and when it eventually returns to public markets. Learn more.

Cavu Consumer Partners has raised $325m for its fifth and largest fund to date, with a continued focus on “better for you” brands in food, beverage, wellness, beauty and pet, per Axios. For beauty and personal care founders, that means more specialist capital chasing clean, functional and ingredient-conscious products while Big CPG plays catch-up with Gen Z and millennial health trends. Fund V’s first deal is in magnesium drink brand Recess, and prior hits like Poppi (sold to Pepsi for nearly $2b) and Once Upon a Farm (now eyeing an IPO) show the exit path when strategics need growth. Cavu also points to new state and school bans on controversial ingredients as a structural tailwind for “free from” and science-backed formulations, nudging the U.S. a bit closer to EU-style standards and creating even more space for better-for-you beauty. Learn more.

Sparxell, a British developer of bio-based replacements for synthetic colorants, raised $5m (€4.2m) in pre-Series A funding led by Swen Capital Partners, with Alpha Star Capital and Cambridge Enterprise participating. The University of Cambridge spin-out uses cellulose-based “structural colour” to make plastic-free, biodegradable pigments, glitters and inks that can substitute for petrochemical dyes in textiles, cosmetics and packaging. The new capital will fund tonne-scale production and product certification for beauty and personal care applications at a time when EU microplastics and PFAS crackdowns are pushing brands to swap out legacy colorants. Learn more.

RoundTable Healthcare Partners has acquired Colorescience, a Carlsbad, Calif.–based premium skincare and sun protection brand, from a shareholder group led by 1315 Capital, per a company release. Colorescience is known for mineral-based, clinically validated SPF and treatment products that are heavily recommended by dermatologists, plastic surgeons, and medspas, and also sold DTC and via major e-commerce platforms. With RoundTable’s healthcare focus and resources, expect a bigger push into professional channels, more SPF-first innovation, and broader awareness around “everyday” sun protection as a core part of clinical-grade skincare routines. Learn more.