True Beauty Ventures is a specialist fund built on the conviction that in beauty, being an insider is a superpower. The firm invests exclusively in emerging beauty and wellness brands from Seed through Series B, writing first checks of roughly 1 to 5 million dollars into companies that already show product excellence, differentiated positioning and strong early performance. Co-founders Rich Gersten and Cristina Nuñez spent their careers investing in and operating consumer and beauty companies at firms including L Catterton, Tengram Capital and North Castle Partners, and they built True Beauty to serve a gap they saw firsthand: exceptional young brands too small for traditional private equity but underserved by generalist venture capital. The firm pairs capital with a hands-on, private equity style partnership model, drawing on a network of retail, supply chain, talent and Amazon platform partners plus limited partners who are themselves beauty founders and executives. Its portfolio spans prestige haircare, skincare, wellness and intimacy brands such as K18, Crown Affair, Maude, Moon Juice and Caliray. The thesis is concentration over volume, with a deliberately small number of brand partners per fund so the team can work closely with each founder through scaling, retail expansion and eventual strategic exit.
Haircare brand K18, which True Beauty Ventures backed across three rounds, was acquired by Unilever in a deal announced in December 2023 that reportedly returned close to 80 percent of the firm's debut fund.