L’Oréal acquires minority stake in French microalgae biotech Microphyt

L’Oréal Group has announced a minority investment in French biotech Microphyt, forming a strategic partnership through L’Oréal’s venture capital fund, BOLD (Business Opportunities for L’Oréal Development).

This partnership forms part of L’Oréal’s Research and Innovation strategy, seeing it invest in innovative biotech start-ups across the world. The strategy is at the heart of L'Oréal’s 2030 sustainable development program, which includes the objective that 95% of its ingredients will be bio-sourced, derived from abundant minerals or from circular processes.

Microphyt, founded in 2007 and based in the city Baillargues, has developed a process with a low carbon impact to produce microalgae - microscopic plant organisms used in cosmetics, among other fields, for their active properties and functional qualities.

Thanks to this patented process and its control of natural stimuli, such as light, salt, nutrients, and temperature variation, Microphyt is among the companies that produce, on a large scale and in a controlled manner, the widest varieties of microalgae in the world.

L'Oréal and Microphyt will build a technological platform and will bring material and human resources together to create raw materials from microalgae biomass. The ambition of both companies is to establish a long-term partnership for the development of new cosmetic solutions.

Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO, in charge of Research, Innovation and Technology, L’Oréal Group, commented: “Our ambition is to collaborate across the world with the most disruptive scientific entities in Green Sciences, in order to collectively develop responsible innovations on a large scale and make them available to as many people as possible.

“We are very pleased to pursue this new partnership with Microphyt, which will enable us, thanks to its unique natural solutions derived from microalgae, to further accelerate our drive towards more sustainable beauty.”

For Microphyt, this partnership with L'Oréal reinforces its strategic roadmap. Since the accomplishment in 2019 of one of the largest fundraisings in its sector, Microphyt has strongly accelerated the development and the marketing of natural ingredients drawn from microalgae for nutrition and cosmetics. In the last 18 months, Microphyt has launched 3 innovative active ingredients in cosmetics and has started the commercialisation of its first two patented ingredients in nutrition.

Vincent Usache, Managing Director of Microphyt, added: “We are delighted with this partnership with L'Oréal, which is fully in line with Microphyt's ambition to give the largest number of people access to natural solutions drawn from microalgae.

“The technological platform in an ‘extended lab’ mode is perfectly complementary to our own activities. With L'Oréal, this new technological platform will help us speed up the development of eco-designed ingredients, as well as facilitate the scale-up of our production.”