Potion

Hi there! We're Alex, Hejab, and Yahya, and we're the co-founders of Potion. We build software to help R&D teams formulate products like cosmetics and paints. Today, companies go through years of trial and error in the lab to develop such goods—with Potion, they can now automate this process.

You can think of formulas like recipes. Chefs (or chemists, in this case) go through countless iterations, manually trying and testing different measurements and combinations of ingredients (chemicals) before finding the perfect recipe. The entire process often takes years and is riddled with failure. We're using data and deep learning to fix that. Our platform allows our customers to collect R&D data, simulate lab experiments, and create entire optimized formulas.

The three of us have been friends for over a decade, have experience applying AI commercially, and became intimately familiar with the (painful) process of product formulation after trying to start our own skincare brand. Now, we work closely with our advisors Chris and Marc, who together have 40+ years' experience formulating across several product categories.

We're an SF-based YC company that just raised $5.4M and are backed by Offline Ventures, 776 Ventures, Tribe Capital, Axial VC, Hawktail Management, Gwyneth Paltrow (Founder of Goop), Matt Ocko & Zach Bogue (Founders of Data Collective VC), Tim Young (President of Dropbox), and a number of other family offices / angels.