Turing Labs grows AI platform for product formulation

8 Feb 2022 --- Virtual product development platform Turing Labs has unveiled its artificial intelligence-led platform that enables beauty and personal care brands to automate the formulation process and predict outcomes. Manmit Shrimali, Co-founder and CEO of Turing Labs, speaks to BPC Insights about the platform - proclaimed by the firm as the fastest way to develop innovative formulation - and its impact on product formulations.

“Founders with decades of experience saw first-hand how long it takes to develop a breakthrough formula and rapidly address regulatory and consumer needs,” says Shrimali, talking about the inspiration behind the platform. “Additionally, the beauty industry is highly competitive with a high turnover. Most products don’t go beyond two-to-three years of shelf life and the large majority fail to produce meaningful returns.” The fail rate of products is more than 80%, Turing Labs says.   

Click to EnlargeSource: Turing Labs.“We realized that the bottleneck is less of where innovation needs to happen but more of how to execute and innovate effectively, replacing years of trial and error process,” notes Shrimali. “That’s the problem we are trying to solve; how to innovate faster, better and cheaper.” 

Turing Labs recognized that generic artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will not work with sparse, partially digitized and multi-dimensional data. “That’s why we build the algorithms and systems ground up exclusively for the beauty and cosmetic industry, addressing a wide range of challenges from data, experimentation and insights to develop better products,” says Shrimali.

The AI platform innovator’s research and development team uploads a wide range of data from the formulation, packaging and process stages of product development. In addition, Turing augments new confidential data. The AI is built exclusively for the domain, rapidly learning and generating insights related to where the brand should prototype. From there, brands can ask Turing Labs to generate an optimal formula that could be an incremental improvement to existing products or that leverages a workflow to develop a breakthrough category disruptor. 

“Simply put, brands no longer have to have the physical trial and error experiments and shoot in the dark,” says Shrimali. “With Turing AI, they can surface the formula optimized for a wide range of business and product goals, all in weeks.”

Formulation needs

Today’s beauty and personal care consumers have some key expectations from their formulations. “Cleaner and efficacious products seem to always be in demand,” notes Shrimali. “Consumers are demanding products that are hyper-focused to their specific needs while considering the cost. Me-too with a high price tag just doesn’t work anymore, they are really looking for disruptive innovation.” 

The new platform aims to help meet BPC consumers’ demands as brands can rapidly reformulate and innovate to meet regulatory, stability, efficacy and several other business and product-related problems. And as Shrimali states: “All in record time from years to weeks. Brands have burned their hands utilizing generic machine learning algorithms or new technology where claims are high but often fail to deliver real return on investment. With Turing, there are no surprises.” 

Turing Labs sees R&D as a multi-stage process, with a wide range of data generated at each stage. Some of this data, it recognizes, is still not fully digitized. “The industry was lacking an R&D specific tool that addresses the beauty and cosmetic-specific challenges, from data, process and tools to human capital,” shares Shrimali. “The market is becoming more competitive and more demanding. However, the brands were always asked to do more with less.” 

Click to EnlargeThe company seeks to share data to take R&D knowledge out of solitary silos.So, Turing Labs asked, ‘How do you achieve this?’. It notes that some companies the brand works with have 2,500 products and on any given year are conducting thousands of projects. It knows that if it could make something that worked with a wide range of data, products and product goals, it would unlock the scalability of these tools that empower teams, so they could respond to the market quickly, save costs and ultimately free themselves up to be more creative and focus more on innovation.  

“At the moment, a lot of the work of product formulation is done by experts who operate in silos,” notes Shrimali. “Sharing data is hard, and the role of a product formulator doesn’t scale. It is hard to truly innovate on ingredients, formulations and new product categories when it is such a manual process.” 

Turing Labs was prompted to enter its most recent financing round in order to respond to its consumers. The brand now wants to scale its sales, marketing and customer delivery team. Most importantly, it states it will be investing heavily in further improving its algorithms and offering new capabilities to brands and suppliers.

The company will use the US$16.5m it recently received to expand its platform. “We see a very cohesive vision coming together in this ecosystem that is consumer packaged goods product development, and our roadmap is tailored to this vertical exclusively,” says Shrimali. “We will use the funds to add more capabilities, algorithms, and workflows. Additionally, Turing is in a unique category of ‘explainable AI’ tools which we want to continue developing further.” 

In 2022 and beyond, Turing Labs wants to make a positive impact, to its users first, but also to the customers of its customers. “With Turing, users are empowered, enamored with their new ability to solve difficult problems faster than ever,” says Shrimali. “What this means for the broader market long term is a wider array of better-for-you, more accessible, more sustainable products. We love working on products that are part of our customers’ loftiest mission.” 

Shrimali concludes: “We want to play a role in helping brands and ingredient suppliers develop better, safer and healthier products. Whenever we see products that were made using Turing on the shelves there is an unbelievable amount of pride knowing we were able to help make it happen.” 

By Natasha Spencer-Jolliffe, BPC Insights Senior Journalist