Originally Published on SmartCompany

Heatseeker has been named one of the winners of L’Oréal’s 2025 Big Bang Beauty Tech Innovation Program. Out of 50,000 startups from across the South Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa regions, the company was the only Australian business to take one of the top spots. Other winners this year included startups from India and the UAE.

The program provides winners with access to the company’s teams across markets and the opportunity to develop pilots with L’Oréal brands.

Two other Australian startups were named as finalists in the program. NewEra Bio, which is developing bio-based hair dyes that reduce environmental impact and allergen exposure, and Springboards, which is developing AI tools for creative teams in advertising agencies.

Co-founded by Kate O’Keeffe, Fiona Triaca and former Atlassian head of product Rutger Coolen, Heatseeker positions itself as the world’s first “experimentation platform”.

The startup says that rather than relying on surveys or focus groups, the platform runs controlled market experiments to observe how customers actually behave when interacting with new product ideas, branding or campaign concepts.

Heatseeker says the aim is to replace intuition-driven decision-making with evidence that reflects the real-world consumer response.

For beauty brands, this includes understanding how creative, messaging and product concepts land across different regions and demographics before launch. This focus aligned with L’Oréal’s broader push into data-driven product development and customer experience.

“At Heatseeker, we’re helping beauty brands move from guessing to knowing, using real behaviour to shape creative, campaigns, and products that truly resonate,” Heatseeker co-founder and COO Fiona Triaca said regarding the win.

“Beauty has always been about self-expression. Now it’s about understanding what connects humans to the brands they trust in, and in real time.

“Massive thanks to the L’Oréal teams for leading the charge in redefining beauty tech, and to our brilliant partners and customers who keep proving that testing in the wild beats assuming in the boardroom.”

This is just the latest in a string of successes for the brand over the past 18 months. In May, it closed a $2.3 million pre-seed round led by San Francisco-based Capital F, with backing from Euphemia, Even Capital and East End Ventures.

At the time, the team added Coolen to the co-founders as it expanded its US go-to-market operations. The company now counts enterprise clients across the US, Europe and Australia.

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