Amyris built a dozen beauty brands at once — then ran out of money to keep them

Amyris was a synthetic-biology company, founded in 2003 with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that made ingredients using engineered microbes. Starting with its skincare brand Biossance in 2016, it decided to become a consumer beauty company — and went on a spree. Over a few years it acquired and launched a portfolio of roughly a dozen brands, including Pipette, JVN Hair, Rose Inc., Stripes, Costa Brazil, MenoLabs, Olika and EcoFabulous, several of them built around celebrity partners.

The portfolio grew faster than the business underneath it. Amyris, by its own account, always struggled with profitability, and the cost of building and marketing so many brands at once mounted. As the beauty market changed and operating costs rose, the company ran into what it called an unsurmountable liquidity crunch. In early 2023 it sold its signature sugarcane-derived squalane ingredient to Givaudan for $200 million in cash, but that was not enough to close the gap.

In August 2023 Amyris filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, listing assets of $500 million to $1 billion and liabilities of $1 billion to $10 billion. It announced it was exiting the consumer brand business entirely: some brands were shut down, and the rest were put up for sale. Biossance, the crown jewel of the portfolio, was bought at auction for $20 million; the consumer brands fetched less than $30 million in total.

Amyris is a case about the difference between a portfolio and a business model. Acquiring and launching a dozen brands at once can build a presence quickly, but it does not build profitability; when the cash ran out, the collection of brands Amyris had spent years and more than a billion dollars assembling was sold for a fraction of what it had cost.