Hair care brand Filament Sciences has raised a seed fund round of $2 million.
The round was led by Wittington Ventures, a family office, while Willow was a secondary investor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Up until now, the company has been self funded by founder and chief executive officer Nathan Puksta, a L’Oréal veteran.
“It was advantageous for us to do it this way for a number of reasons,” Puksta said in an interview. “It allowed me to control dilution, and retain the vast majority of ownership. I was vastly oversubscribed on the round, so I ended up having to cut a lot of people out, which was good because although it was an awkward conversation to have, we ended up with just two major players rather than having a bunch of people on the cap table.”
The brand debuted in January with an exclusive retail partnership with Violet Grey. It is also available at dermatology offices and professional salons. Currently, the majority of revenue comes from the professional and dermatological channels.
Its inaugural product available at Violet Grey, TS.02/TT: Tensile Strength Hair Treatment Mask, $48, features Tensilyx — a patented molecular structure that helps kickstart keratin synthesis. There is also a professional grade version of this available at salons, while more products are currently under development.
“We’re going to use a good portion of [the funds] for working capital, just because we need inventory for the level at which we’re growing. We are going to very, very much focus on the salon professional channel and continue to build that out,” said Puksta, teasing that he just signed a big distributor.
“I’ve already made some key hires that I’ll be announcing shortly to support the salon professional business,” he continued. “Supporting the stylists, which is our number-one goal, is costly in a sense, where it takes a lot of people, a lot of educators, and things like that, so we’re actually investing mostly in working capital, but obviously in the team and people and education. We’re not really the kind of brand that’s going to go and do influencer campaigns or obsess over TikTok shop yet.”
While comparisons have been made to other bond building brands such as Olaplex and K18, he believes a brand like Kérastase is a better comparison “because we’re going to be solving multiple hair care problems rather than just a structure function technology that’s propagated through an ecosystem that focuses on one clinical proposition.”
