Ekkio Capital launches Sweetch to disrupt biotech beauty ingredients

The Paris-based independent management company, which solely invests in high-potential European SMEs, has previously acquired brands and contract manufacturing companies and has now created Sweetch – a specialty beauty ingredient manufacturer that will focus on high-tech, plant-based cosmetics products.

The newly formed business will group three natural ingredients companies that it has acquired “under one umbrella.” These companies are:

• Gobiotics, which develops pre-, post- and probiotics, and will focusing on skin microbiota-friendly and natural alternatives to surfactants, conditioners, and emulsifiers.
• Creathes, which develops new generations of powders, dispersions, granules, gels, and beads
• And CreaChem, which is a leader in the production of saccharides from chicory roots, beet roots and rice.

Nature-derived beauty ingredients: unstoppable​

Sweetch’s CEO Tony Jaillot said that consumers’ desire to use beauty brands built on nature-derived ingredients is “unstoppable” and “shaping the present and future of the industry.”

“While there are many great renewable ingredients on the market, we believe that there is a novel way to assemble them into differentiating concepts while bringing new technologies to life, from untapped food technologies to biotech or even other industries,” he said.

Sweetch said it hopes to impact the beauty industry by demonstrating the power and benefits of natural ingredients through plant-based and biotech solutions, open innovation, and advanced formulations.

It is aiming to “have a positive impact for people and planet at scale” using upcycled feedstocks, microbiome-oriented functional and active ingredients, low-energy formulation, and more.

Partner at Ekkio Capital, Thibaud Gachet, said that Sweetch has “a strong strategy in place to fuel growth and offer novel ingredients to the beauty industry that will scale quickly.”

CEO at acquired company GoBiotics Ingredients, Dorota Gonry, shared that from her perspective becoming part of Sweetch “will amplify our R&D resources, production capacity and our level of customer service.”

Gonry added that “More and more iconic ingredients are coming.”

Meanwhile Hervé Huillier, who is the founder of Creathes and will now be group COO at Sweetch, explained that the company has expertise in natural delivery systems and its ambition is to bring performance to natural cosmetics, by combining well-being, innovation, health and sustainability. 

“Sweetch shares our values and will allow us to realise this ambition by supporting our R&D, the deployment of our industrial tools and by developing our sales,” shared Huillier.

CreaChem’s CEO Karl Booten added that the company’s acquisition by Sweetch “will lead to many synergies with the other partners leading to many successes.”