Beyond skin deep: Beauty startup uses AI to help people improve their skincare
Smartphones have tools to track our steps, heart rate, and sleep every day. Anastasia Georgievskaya, founder and CEO of AI startup Haut.AI, wanted a tool to track skin health.
Georgievskaya’s background is in skincare research and development. She kept seeing the same gap: people don’t always achieve their skincare goals, not because products don’t work, but because they use the wrong ones, use them inconsistently, or simply don’t know what their skin truly needs.
Haut.AI, a Microsoft for Startups collaborator, translates selfies people take on their smartphones into insights about skin and hair, helping them understand their skin better, receive product recommendations tailored to their unique needs, and make smarter care decisions.
Skin is deeply personal, and even small mistakes can undermine confidence in both the technology and the brand behind it. From the beginning, Haut.AI has approached AI in skincare the way one would approach clinical science, with rigor, responsibility, and transparency.
Building fair technology begins with having diverse, balanced representation across skin tone, age, gender, and skin type, Georgievskaya said. Haut.AI has over 3 million images across different ethnicities, age groups, and even rare dermatological conditions.
It’s essential to have strong representation across age groups so the AI can extract biomarkers in a meaningful way, instead of guessing based on a narrow sample. To make skin tone analysis more reliable across lighting conditions and image quality, Haut.AI also applies the Monk Skin Tone Scale to ensure consistency and reduce bias.
Face imagery is an intimate data type, so Haut.AI informs consumers when AI is being used and how their images are processed and stored. The company also developed Skin Atlas, a patented anonymization technology, to protect facial identity without compromising analytical accuracy.
“We take privacy seriously,” Georgievskaya said.
Haut.AI delivers its technology to end consumers by working with leading skincare brands and retail partners, such as Ulta Beauty. By integrating Haut.AI’s diagnostics into their digital or physical experiences, these brands can offer personalized, engaging, and trustworthy skin assessments at scale. These partnerships have also taught Haut.AI to design for real human behavior, not just ideal lab conditions.
“We learn from them because they have well-organized, reproducible processes,” Georgievskaya said. “Ultimately, that’s what turns AI from a demo into something people trust and use repeatedly.”
Working with the Haut.AI team has been an exceptional experience, said Vikas Arora, Microsoft for Startups success manager.
“From pioneering hyper-realistic skin analysis to driving major wins with some of our largest retail and consumer product group enterprise customers, they bring a rare combination of technical excellence, commercial maturity, and relentless execution,” said Arora. “Their collaborative approach and their ability to co-develop, adapt, and move with speed makes them one of our most forward-thinking Pegasus partners.”
Join a LinkedIn Live on February 27, 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET, featuring Haut.AI and founder Anastasia Georgievskaya. Join the conversation — register here.
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