Shakiba Kaveh wants to take skin out of the dark

Skincare is a massive global business, and the industry is always looking for ways to answer a basic question: how well the products people buy actually work in real life.While much of health has moved toward hard data, the skin remains a category difficult to measure objectively.Shakiba Kaveh, the brain behind Mitra Bio, has spent close to a decade trying to present an accessible solution.

A researcher and Cambridge-trained scientist, she’s built a way to read skin biology without cutting into it, and now, she’s preparing to put that tool into consumers’ hands.The founder and chief executive of Mitra Bio, Kaveh has treated the beauty industry as a scientist first.She earned a PhD in materials science at Cambridge before taking her first job at L’Oréal in Paris, on a research campus devoted entirely to skin and hair.

The work put her among high-tech instruments and deep in the science of cosmetics at one of the industry’s biggest names.Her assignment sounded simple but proved anything but: find a biomarker that could prove whether sunscreen actually worked.That task exposed a problem that would follow her for years.Reading what happens inside skin, without cutting into it, was much harder than skincare’s marketing let on.

The gap between what products claimed and what anyone could prove bothered her on a personal level, too.A lifelong user of skincare who says she has never wanted her skin to age, she wanted evidence behind what she bought and kept coming up empty.

“My personal motivation was to make the marketing of skincare scientific,” she says.She then spent a few years in management consulting, then joined the Entrepreneur First accelerator in 2020, where Mitra Bio began taking shape.Kaveh’s starting point is blunt: skincare is a large industry in which it’s difficult to prove whether products work.Efficacy, she argues, is often judged subjectively, by looking in the mirror, rather than through biological measurements.“Skincare is a ...