Four startups from Australia, India, and the 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.

Vismay Sharma, President of L’Oréal SAPMENA Zone, said, 

“SAPMENA is one of the world’s most dynamic regions, with millions of young, digitally-savvy consumers fueling the rapid rise of digital commerce and brand innovation. While Silicon Valley often comes to mind for startups, we believe the center of gravity for innovation is increasingly diversifying and shifting to regions like SAPMENA where market demand is shaping ideas to impact. The pitches at the Grand Finale are a testament to this and reaffirm the opportunities for open innovation here. By partnering with these next-gen innovators, we can accelerate the pace of beauty tech transformation and amplify the impact of new ideas across the beauty ecosystem.”

The winning startups – Halo AI (UAE), Heatseeker (Australia), Sravathi AI (India) and Without (India) – now can 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 program’s partners, namely Accenture, Google, and Meta. Wubble AI (Singapore) also received a Special Mention.

The 2025 program 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.

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 monetize 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. 

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 behaviors like clicks to gauge interest in new products, messages, and markets. 

The platform leverages advanced AI to automate experiment setup, analyze 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 optimization, 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 revolutionizes chemical development with automated route-of-synthesis design, yield optimization, 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, personalized 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 customized 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.

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