L’Oréal acquires minority stake in French biotech firm Microphyt

Beauty giant L’Oréal has established a strategic partnership with Microphyt, which has seen the group’s venture capital fund acquire a minority stake in the French biotech company.

The deal builds on L’Oréal’s Research and Innovation strategy centred towards Greens Science and investments in innovative biotech start-ups around the world.

The strategy comes as part of the group’s 2030 sustainable development programme, through which L’Oréal said it is aiming for 95 percent of its ingredients to be bio-sourced and derived from abundant minerals or circular processes.

Founded in 2007, Microphyt has become known for the development of low carbon impact microalgae, a plant organism used in cosmetics.

The patented process has allowed the company to produce the widest variety of the organism in the world, L’Oréal noted in a release.

Together, the duo will build a technological platform and bring resources together to create raw materials from microalgae biomass, with the long-term goal of developing new cosmetic solutions.

Commenting on the partnership, Vincent Usache, managing director of Microphyt, said: “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.”

The new deal further expands L'Oréal’s presence within the area of Green Sciences, with it also recently having forged similar partnerships with the likes of the National Institute for Materials Sciences (NIMS) in Japan and the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE).