French beauty powerhouse L’Oréal has announced the new start-ups selected for the second round of its Beauty Tech Accelerator program, launched last year in partnership with global digital accelerator and incubator Founders Factory.

Start-ups Sampler and Riviter will join the second round, six-month program, while L’Oréal has also announced it will ‘support the growth’ of Alegra, a start-up currently in the Founders Factory accelerator. The selected start-ups place emphasis on analytics and visual search, with L’Oréal said to look at the development plan as a two-way partnership and a way for the company to develop the digital outlook of its own brands.

Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer L’Oréal, said, “Merging the innovation capacities of L’Oréal with those of beauty tech startups creates a powerful synergy which helps to address the aspirations of our consumers and to build a new generation of personalised and smart digital services. In this “test&learn” approach, we are supporting the development and growth of promising young entrepreneurs by sharing our expertise and network, and in the meantime we invite them to bring new ideas to the digital projects of our brands. Open innovation is a win-win strategy that fosters disruptive thinking and pushes forward our digital leadership in beauty.”  

Sampler was founded in 2013 and works on helping brands ‘manage and measure their product sampling strategies through a more effective and targeted approach,’ while Riviter is a US company that has developed a search engine using patented AI technology. The search engine then matches up products within imagery and detects ‘both precise location and detailed attributes of the products.’