17 hours ago
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Debut
Organic chemist Joshua Britton honed his elevator pitch while driving for Uber as a side hustle. The idea that the beauty industry is moving away from petroleum to a new era of ingredients made in biotech labs persuaded one of his passengers to give him $100,000 in 2019 as Debut Biotech's first angel investor. 'She told me to get out of the Uber and get my ass into the lab,' CEO Britton says. Today San Diego-based Debut not only has its Deinde line of fossil-fuel-free skincare products, but also a partnership with L'Oreal to replace more than a dozen conventionally sourced ingredients used across the cosmetics giant's product portfolio with its own 'bio identical ingredients.' One example unveiled in February 2025: a synthetic vegan replica of carmine, a red pigment normally derived from beetles and used in various cosmetic products. Creating raw materials in the lab instead of extracting the planet's resources has other applications, too. Debut was awarded $2 million from the U.S. Department of Defense in July 2024 to create plans for a domestic biomanufacturing production facility to reduce the country's reliance on foreign sources of vital chemicals.
