For their first foray in the beauty industry, husband and wife Britta Cox and Suveen Sahib served as co-CEOs of Aquis, the San Francisco-based company Cox founded in 1990 that became popular for selling a towel engineered to dry hair without damaging it. As sales increased, Cox and Sahib decided to build a separate business that could protect hair from the inside out.
In 2018, the duo teamed up with scientists with the hopes of developing a molecule that could repair hair, returning it to the way it was before it was damaged by bleach, dyes, or other chemicals. They sequenced thousands of amino acid chains until they were successful. "It wasn't some magical molecule that you find in the Amazon forest," says Sahib. "It took a lot of work."
The co-founders named their startup K18 after its signature ingredient, K18Peptide, and hit the market in 2020 with a hair-repairing mask. Their creation quickly caught the attention of San Francisco private equity firm VMG Partners, which in January 2022 made a minority investment worth a reported $25 million. It ended up being one of the best decisions either would ever make.