In this Beauty Investor Q&A, Tina Bou-Saba, Founder of CXT Investments, breaks down her approach to early-stage beauty and wellness investing—and what sets her apart.
Tina has been investing in the consumer space since 2016 through CXT Investments, the firm she founded to back purpose-driven founders building the next wave of standout consumer brands and the tech powering them.
With deep expertise in beauty and wellness, she’s been an early investor in some of the most compelling names in the space—Alleyoop, Dae Hair, Ami Colé, Ayla, Kinship, SAIE, Kosas, Exponent, Olive & June, August, and more.
A Harvard MBA, Tina brings a sharp commercial lens shaped by her time at LBrands and Morgan Stanley.
Investor: CXT Investments
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California
Stage: Early-Stage(“Emerging Growth Stage,” in her own words)
BEAUTY & WELLNESS PORTFOLIO
Q1: Please tell us about CXT's mission and vision & What would the world miss if CXT isn't around? & Why should beauty and wellness brands choose CXT?
Tina:
Beauty is a personal passion of mine. I’ve loved the category for as long as I can remember. I was fortunate to work at L Brands over a decade ago, where I had the opportunity to work on commercial strategy and customer insights for Victoria’s Secret Beauty and Bath & Body Works. There I learned about the power of brand, customer loyalty, and products that surprise and delight. I realized that beauty was a highly lucrative business, particularly when those things came together to drive high growth and strong margins. This planted the seed for me to combine my passion for beauty with business opportunities in the category.
Fast forward a few years, when I was at the start of my own entrepreneurial journey. I observed the explosion of independent brands, especially in clean beauty. I realized that my experience and expertise in beauty and personal care, combined with many years of business experience and a strong instinct for commercial opportunities, enabled me to add significant value as an investor and advisor to early-stage brands. I built out this business organically, focused on being a strategic, empathetic, and supportive partner to entrepreneurs. Mine was very much a “word of mouth” reputation that I built as a highly respected early investor and advisor, which in turn led to tremendous growth in the opportunities that I saw.
Today, I stay true to that initial vision, working closely with talented, visionary founders who are addressing white space in the beauty and wellness categories. As an entrepreneur myself, I understand what it means to be in the trenches building a business. I am always just a phone call or text message away to work through challenges with entrepreneurs. I have deep expertise and network in the industry and maintain extensive relationships across the value chain including brands, corporates, retailers, investors, suppliers, and so on. I regularly leverage these to support portfolio companies.
For me as an investor, relationships are crucial. I pride myself on being a trustworthy and supportive “first call” that a founder may make when they are working through a problem. I may not have the immediate answer, but I am always ready to dig in together, with a bias toward action and outcomes. I love this space, and I love working closely with founders and their teams.
Q2. Do you have an investment criteria specific to a beauty, health and wellness brand and are these different from e-commerce and community & tech? Who would you encourage to reach out to you, especially in 2025?
Tina:
I refer to my investment stage as “emerging growth.” The framework for investing in consumer brands is very different from that of early-stage technology. For brands, I typically target at least several million dollars of revenue before I consider investing. However, I love talking to founders well in advance of that milestone! This is truly a relationship business, and the earlier that I get to know a founder and their team, the more efficiently and effectively I can evaluate their ability to execute and build traction in the marketplace, when it comes time for a potential investment.
Tech investing is a different animal entirely. I am highly selective in this area since I am not an expert tech investor. I specifically focus on companies that are solving a problem for brands that I deeply understand and appreciate. In other words, I want to see a solution that brands I know are already paying for or would seriously consider doing so. I look at these opportunities through the lens of consumer brands. As an investor in these types of businesses, I strive to add meaningful value, and I can best do that through product feedback and customer introductions.
Q3. Which stage does CXT typically invest, & how much, in a beauty, health and wellness brand, how do you value an investment and do you have a specific arrangement you go for?
Tina:
When I first began investing in consumer brands a decade ago, the market was dramatically different from today. Capital was cheap and free-flowing, and many brands still raised money against the “DTC craze” of the 2010s. I saw consumer brand founders across categories raise millions of dollars with just a pitch deck. In retrospect, of course, this was ridiculous. Consumer brands are not technology companies, and the framework for investing in them and working with them is completely different.
My early investments were usually as a “strategic angel investor” in rounds of $2-$5 million, typically alongside a lead VC, although sometimes just other individual investors. I quickly observed that there was a significant gap in the market for consumer brand specialists who could lead or at least catalyze an investment round, and who understood how to appropriately capitalize and operate these businesses, and what a successful exit looks like. I will admit that I learned some hard lessons as a small investor in consumer brands that had technology venture capital investors leading their rounds. This unfortunately was not a set-up for success, typically. The expectations and business models of tech VCs do not align with the growth trajectory, range of outcomes, and capital efficiency of consumer brands. It was clear to me that a different type of investor and investment strategy was needed for brands at the emerging growth stage.
Today, with respect to minority investments, I am focused on brands with roughly $2M to $10M in revenue. This is where I can add the most value as a “boutique” type investor, while achieving meaningful ownership commensurate with the value that I bring to the table. I am highly selective about these types of opportunities and may only make one or two investments per year, at least for the near- to medium-term. I would rather roll up my sleeves and work alongside a founder with whom I have built a strong relationship in an environment that is choppy (to say the least) and where capital is highly constrained.
At the same time, for several important reasons that reflect today’s market environment, I am aggressively exploring additional approaches, including control investments and full acquisitions. I believe that the “supply” of healthy brands with strong distribution significantly exceeds the ability and/or willingness (ie the “demand”) of strategics to buy them. This dynamic is creating a significant opportunity for alternative structures for highly strategic and opportunistic investors like me.
Q4: With digital advertising getting expensive, retail becoming tougher & supply chain woes continuing to be challenging: "How do you see the funding amounts (and revenue that interests you) evolving in the near future by stage?
Tina:
Brands are operating in an increasingly challenging environment, to be sure. That said, I am confident that beauty and wellness will continue to be relatively resilient consumer categories. This does not mean that they won’t be impacted at all by declining consumer confidence and spending, but rather that hopefully the impact will be modest, especially compared to other discretionary categories.
Still, fundraising for early-stage brands is quite challenging today. I don’t expect that absolute funding amounts will change significantly since there is a floor to the capital required to hit milestones for any growing business. (And I would caution both investors and founders to resist the urge to invest / raise small amounts below that floor. It’s often simply inadequate to give the business a fair shot at early success.)
However, I expect that the cost of that capital – in other words, valuation – may be pressured for the foreseeable future. Investors understandably want to be rewarded for the extremely high risk that they are taking at the early stage in a difficult and uncertain operating environment. Of course, there are always company-specific exceptions. I am describing general conditions here.
Q5. How do you see AI influencing & contributing to the analysis of a deal & success of a venture? Where do you see the biggest opportunity with AI & how?- Research, Deal Sourcing, Deal Diligence & Analysis, Marketing, Portfolio Support, Reporting?
Tina:
AI is an outstanding tool, and I have been challenging myself to interact with it every day for tasks large and small. I don’t doubt that I will use AI for increasingly complex tasks over time. However, I expect that these tasks will involve research, reporting, financial analysis, and things like that. There is simply no substitute for relationships in early-stage investing. I don’t think that AI will have much impact on the work that I do to build relationships with founders. (Except to perhaps make scheduling easier – HA!)
Q6: What are the 3 biggest consumer trends, for beauty and wellness, you are watching very closely at CXT Ventures and what's your take on each of those three?
Tina:
I would probably describe these as major focus areas rather than trends. They include women’s health and wellness (especially 40+ women, a vast and underserved market), longevity and healthy aging, and aesthetics. There is some overlap here, to be sure. I believe that there are tremendous opportunities for both product and service businesses that effectively address these areas.
Q7: Is there a trend around investors wanting to fund beauty and wellness brands? Who(type) is getting fed up with the sector, who is upping the momentum, and who is going to move on?
Tina:
We have certainly seen most traditional tech VCs exit the beauty space; in fact, I almost never cross paths with those sorts of investors in my brand work. This is appropriate; consumer brands are not a good fit for the tech venture model and that is ok. Investing in brands is a fundamentally different business with different timelines, capital efficiency, operational needs, and paths to exit. Ours is a specialized space and today we see mostly specialists backing these types of companies. I believe that this is generally a good thing, although it has limited the capital available to brands, especially at the early-stage when PE is not involved.
Q8: What are the traits common to all the super successful beauty founders you have funded?
Tina:
Beauty is a highly emotional category, more so than any other in my opinion. The best beauty founders understand this intuitively. They know that they need to capture their customers’ hearts, first and foremost. It’s not an intellectual exercise; rather, it’s primarily an emotional one. The best beauty founders live and breathe this.
They also tend to be highly creative. In fact, I’ve noticed that many beauty founders paint, draw, play a musical instrument, that sort of thing. It’s not a requirement, of course! But many highly creative people have various outlets including and beyond their work with their brands. Businesspeople like me who deeply respect creative talent and can “speak the language” of creatives can be terrific partners to beauty founders. But we rarely succeed as the founder ourselves, in my opinion. The big, wild, audacious vision usually comes from a uniquely talented creative founder who sees what businesspeople don’t see.
Q9: What are the most common mistakes you see founders making in their fundraising efforts with outreach or in pitching their ventures to you?
Tina:
SUMMARY
Tina at CXT Investments seeks to fund and support purpose-driven entrepreneurs who are building the next generation of great consumer, beauty and wellness companies.
- Investment Criteria: Emerging growth stage-Seeks beauty/wellness brands with $2M-$10M revenue though prefers to develop relationship way in advance.
- Investment Types: Minority Investments, exploring control and full acquisitions.
- Top 3 Current Focus Areas: (40+)Women’s health & wellness, longevity & healthy aging, and aesthetics
- Founder Fundraising Mistakes: Don’t build relationships in advance of funding conversations.
- Successful Beauty & Wellness Founder Traits: Intuitively understand emotional drivers of beauty & wellness category, and are highly creative.
- Word of Caution: Would caution both investors and founders to resist the urge to invest / raise small amounts below that floor. It’s often simply inadequate to give the business a fair shot at early success.
- Changes Ahead: Valuation likely to be pressured for the foreseeable future.
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