Proven Group

Proven Group, operating as PROVEN Skincare, is a San Francisco-based consumer packaged goods company that uses data, machine learning and personalization to create individualized skincare products. Customers complete an online quiz covering attributes such as age, ethnicity, lifestyle and geographic location; the responses generate a skin profile and a matched set of products. The company markets personalized routines for specific concerns such as acne-prone skin, with a science-backed quiz as the entry point to a recommended regimen.

Formulations draw on an in-house database that the company describes as the largest beauty database in the world, referred to as the Skin Genome Project (also called the Beauty Genome Project). Company materials state the database was built by co-founder Amy Yuan, a computational physicist trained at Stanford, and covers more than 20 million consumer data points, including analysis of over 8 million skincare reviews across more than 100,000 products, 20,000 ingredients and 4,000 peer-reviewed academic papers. Personalized products are said to be based on more than 47 factors about an individual's skin, genetic background, lifestyle and environment.

Beyond direct-to-consumer sales, the company frames its data and personalization approach as a change to how CPG companies operate, citing less wasteful and more targeted marketing, more efficient inventory turnover and longer customer lifetime value.

Founding story

Proven Group was founded in 2018 by Amy Yuan and Ming Zhao and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch. Yuan, trained in large-scale computational physics at Stanford, built the company's proprietary skin and beauty database in-house, which became the foundation for its personalized formulations.

Business model

Proven sells personalized skincare products directly to consumers online. Prospective customers complete a free quiz that produces a skin profile, and the company then supplies a routine of products formulated for that profile, positioning itself as a data- and personalization-driven consumer packaged goods operator.

Traction

The Y Combinator profile lists a team size of 40 and active status. Recognition includes MIT's AI Technology of the Year award for the company's database, an MIT AI Startup Idol award, selection for Sephora's beauty innovation accelerator, and inclusion in an Oscars nominee gift basket. Co-founder Amy Yuan is described as having co-founded and scaled an AI-powered personalization company to more than $150 million in total revenue.