Nykaa and L’Oréal Join Forces to Empower India’s Next Beauty Icons

• The collaboration involves taking minority stakes, ensuring founders retain full operational and creative control of their independent brands.
• Combining capital with strategic mentorship, global beauty expertise, and local insights to support the booming Indian startup ecosystem.

Nykaa, India’s largest beauty retail company, and BOLD (Business Opportunities for L’Oréal Development), the corporate venture capital fund of L’Oréal, today announced a collaboration to jointly invest in the next generation of high-growth Indian beauty and personal care brands.

Through the collaboration, BOLD and Nykaa will take minority stakes in emerging Indian beauty and wellness brands with strong consumer traction and distinctive propositions. Such investments will be purely financial and minority in nature, where founders retain full ownership control and continue to run their businesses independently, with their own teams, culture, and creative direction.

BOLD and Nykaa will act as long-term partners beyond capital to the brands they back, offering mentorship, guidance, and the opportunity to benefit from L’Oréal’s global beauty expertise, alongside Nykaa’s deep omnichannel retail network and consumer ecosystem understanding. The intent is to help ambitious Indian beauty founders scale faster and build enduring brands for India & the world.

Jacques Lebel, Managing Director, L’Oréal India, said: “India is one of the most exciting beauty markets in the world, and its energy comes both from an expanding base of demanding consumers with rapidly evolving needs and from its ecosystem of tremendous entrepreneurs. Through BOLD and this partnership with Nykaa, we want to stand behind that talent — backing founders with capital, mentorship, and L’Oréal’s beauty expertise, while leaving them free to build their brands their way. Our commitment to India is stronger than ever, and this is the next major milestone in a journey of partnership and growth that we began over three decades ago.”

Anchit Nayar, Executive Director and CEO, Nykaa Beauty, said: “Nykaa and L’Oréal have been partners in India for over a decade, working together on our shared vision of making India into one of the world's largest and fastest growing beauty markets. The experience and lessons we have learned along the way have allowed us to understand what it takes to build a promising brand into an enduring one. Combining our strong consumer ecosystem, deep retail network and wide distribution, along with L’Oréal’s global beauty expertise will be an incredibly valuable asset to the next generation of founders as they look to build consumer brands that India can be proud of.”