L’Oréal has acquired the outstanding shares of water tech startup Gjosa.
The beauty giant aims to scale the Switzerland-based company’s water-saving solutions for use in the beauty industry.
L’Oréal said the move also reinforces its environmental goals and aims to improve the business’ water management systems and technology.
“Acquiring Gjosa further strengthens our ability to build sustainability directly into our products and services, allowing us to seamlessly integrate water-conserving technology into new formulations and Beauty Tech innovations,” said Nicolas Hieronimus CEO of L’Oréal Group.
“Together, we can rapidly scale up sustainable beauty solutions with enhanced performance that are less resource intensive and introduce them to the wider beauty ecosystem.”
L’Oréal has been working with Gjosa since 2015, collaborating together to develop shampoo rinse technologies designed to save water.
This includes the development of a shower head that is designed to use 1.5 litres of water to rinse shampoo compared with the average 8 litres.
Gjosa also helped to create the L’Oréal Water Saver shower head in 2021, an in-salon hair care system and at-home beauty tool.
L’Oréal made its first minority investment into the startup that same year, through its corporate venture capital fund, BOLD (Business Opportunities for L’Oréal Development).
"L’Oréal has been our most important partner and it makes utmost sense to become part of the L’Oréal Groupe of companies, as we seek to build on the early success of Water Saver and parlay this into new use cases, form factors and markets," added Amin Abdulla, co-Founder and Board Member of Gjosa.
“Our partnership has been extremely open and collaborative from the start, so the whole of Gjosa is excited for this new chapter as part of the L’Oréal Groupe family and culture.”