Glossier Said To Have Raised $100M At $1.2B Valuation

Another day, another unicorn.

Direct-to-consumer beauty company Glossier has raised a $100 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital that takes the startup’s valuation to over $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Originally founded as a beauty blog by Emily Weiss, New York-based Glossier has grown into a $100 million a year in revenue business. Not only has the e-tailer’s revenue surpassed $100 million, the rate at which it did so is impressive. According to Reuters, revenue more than doubled in 2018. It plans to use the new capital to expand its product line, reports say.

Prior to this funding, Glossier had raised a total of $186.4 million. Its last raise was a $52 million Series C in February 2018 co-led by Index Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners at a pre-money valuation of $338 million, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Grand View Research predicts that the global beauty and personal care products industry will grow to $716.6 billion by 2025, and companies like Glossier are poised to capitalize on that. The startup started out in 2014 almost exclusively online. It currently has nearly 2 million Instagram followers and is an example of the power of social media to sell products, particularly among millennials and Generation Z.

(Crunchbase News reached out to Glossier prior to publication, but the firm declined to answer questions.)

As we reported in 2017, the beauty industry has seen some impressive exits. In 2016, L’oreal agreed to acquire prestige beauty brand IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion in cash in a deal that marked its largest purchase in eight years. Also in 2016, Estee Lauder bought out makeup brand Too Faced Cosmetics for $1.45 billion. Notably, the brand also targets millennials and Generation Z, with 85 percent of its consumers reportedly under the age of 40, according to The Street.