Startups from Australia, India and UAE crowned winners in L’Oréal Groupe’s biggest Beauty Tech competition across South Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa

This press release was issued by L’Oréal Groupe.

Four startups from Australia, India and United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been crowned winners of L’Oréal’s 2025 SAPMENA Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program, the biggest open innovation competition of its kind in the South Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa (SAPMENA) region.

The winning startups – Halo AI (UAE), Heatseeker (Australia), Sravathi AI (India) and Without (India) – now have the opportunity to collaborate with L’Oréal in a commercial pilot with one of the Group’s 37 international brands. They will also gain potential exposure to 35 markets across SAPMENA and embark on a year-long mentorship journey with senior executives from L’Oréal and the programme’s partners, namely Accenture, Google and Meta. Wubble AI (Singapore) also received a Special Mention.

Hailing from SAPMENA's vast and promising talent pool, these teams highlight the extraordinary creativity and innovation of the region's vibrant startup ecosystem. This ecosystem is driven by dynamic market growth, large populations, a rising middle class and digitally-savvy young consumers.

The 2025 programme reached over 50,000 startups and drew applications from across the SAPMENA region, including teams from Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. Over nine months, the startups competed in a rigorous process, presenting solutions in areas such as Consumer Experience, Content & Media, New Commerce, Tech for Good, and Science for Beauty. The competition culminated in the Grand Finale in Singapore on 7 November, where 10 shortlisted startups pitched their bold, scalable and tech-driven ideas to a distinguished judging panel of industry experts from L’Oréal, Google, Meta and Veros Ventures.

L'Oréal is dedicated to fostering a culture of innovation. In 2025, L’Oréal Groupe was named the most innovative company in Europe by Fortune magazine, out of 300 companies, in a ranking spanning 21 countries and 16 industries in Europe. Fast Company named L'Oréal in its Top 50 2024 Best Workplaces for Innovators list and winner of the Beauty and Fashion category, in recognition of its commitment to encourage and develop innovation at all levels.

Results of the 2025 L'Oréal SAPMENA Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program

Grand Finale Winners

• Halo AI (UAE): Halo AI helps brands scale their content creator collaborations with AI-powered analysis to manage, vet and select creators. Influencer marketing is booming, but the challenge has been a reliance on inefficient, manual processes, which makes it difficult for brands to find truly authentic partners and for creators to monetise effectively. Halo AI addresses this by using advanced AI to precisely match brands with nano and micro-influencers, creating authentic, high-engagement collaborations. Its AI-powered platform reduces manual workflows by 80% and allows campaigns to launch in as little as 15 minutes, ensuring personal, impactful brand messages reach consumers through trusted influencers with genuine audience connections.
• Heatseeker (Australia): Heatseeker enables marketers to run live, in-market experiments with real customers using its AI-powered platform, providing rapid, quantitative evidence. A significant challenge for businesses before launching a new product is making decisions based on traditional market research, which can be unreliable or fail to capture genuine customer intent. Heatseeker transforms this process by enabling teams to run rapid, real-world experiments with actual customers on platforms like Meta and LinkedIn, directly measuring authentic customer behaviours like clicks to gauge interest in new products, messages and markets. The platform leverages advanced AI to automate experiment setup, analyse competitor and audience data, and deliver actionable insights within days. This ensures companies launch offerings that are relevant to and resonate with consumers, particularly those launching new products, messages, customer segments or entering new markets.
• Sravathi AI (India): Sravathi AI is a silico chemistry AI platform that designs and develops advanced pharma using AI, molecular modelling, biochemistry and chemical engineering. Sravathi AI is an AI-powered company delivering end-to-end solutions for molecule discovery, development and scalable manufacturing. Its drug discovery platform rapidly identifies novel drug candidates, streamlines hit-to-lead and lead optimisation, and reduces clinical risks, building a robust pipeline of 9 therapeutic assets across multiple disease areas. Complementing this, Sravathi AI’s award-winning Chemistry AI platform revolutionises chemical development with automated route-of-synthesis design, yield optimisation, impurity prediction and process scalability.
• Without (India): Without is a material science enterprise ethically transforming unrecyclable waste into high-quality, recyclable materials and products, creating a circular economy. A deep-tech social enterprise based in Pune, India, Without (by Ashaya) focuses on addressing two deeply interconnected global challenges: plastic waste and poverty. It has developed a patented chemo-mechanical process that transforms “impossible-to-recycle” plastic waste, such as multi-layered packaging from chips, chocolate, and shampoo sachets, into high-quality, toxin-free and recyclable materials. Without believes circularity must be ethical to be effective and its model aims to create environmental and social value simultaneously and to demonstrate that scalable, tech-enabled solutions can drive deep, lasting change.

Special Mention

• Wubble AI (Singapore): Wubble AI is the world's first enterprise grade AI solution for businesses to create royalty-free, personalised music in seconds. Wubble AI uses generative AI to instantly produce bespoke, royalty-free music for brands tailored for specific campaign aesthetics, audience profiles or seasonal moods – without legal overhead or long production cycles. This enables brands to elevate in-store, digital and experiential moments with customised sonic identities. Whether it’s background scores for virtual try-ons, ambient soundtracks for flagship stores or mood-aligned music for social media content, Wubble AI ensures brand coherence at scale. AI-powered music creation also enables rapid A/B testing of audio branding across regions or products, giving companies precise control and creative agility.