Overlooked by the sharks on “Shark Tank,” but then grew 2,800% in one year to prove them wrong, cult-favorite PROVEN will raise capital from viewers and other investors on innovative new entrepreneurship show
Crush Capital, the fintech firm behind new entrepreneurship series “Going Public,” recently announced that AI-powered skincare company PROVEN will be the first venture featured on the groundbreaking show’s premiere season.
Known as “the Tesla of skincare,” PROVEN shot into the spotlight last year when its female founders, Ming Zhao and Dr. Amy Yuan, appeared on “Shark Tank” to showcase their business, the first to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create the world’s most customized skincare products and winner of major technology awards. The sharks rejected them, but thousands of viewers loved what they saw, and many more resonated with their message, propelling PROVEN to multi-million dollar sales. Now, through “Going Public” – the first series ever to allow viewers to buy into companies featured on-screen – Zhao and Dr. Yuan hope to turn some of those viewers and fans into investors.
“Entrepreneurs found businesses based on their passion, but only customers can make them successful,” says Zhao. “It makes perfect sense that we would share the continued success of PROVEN with the people who help make it happen. Raising funding through ‘Going Public’ will help strengthen our community of investors, customers and advocates, and enable us to bring value to more people.”
Zhao, who immigrated to the U.S. from China at age 12, earned an MBA at Harvard University and then worked at Bain Capital. After seeing the damage the stress from her high-flying career in private equity was causing her skin, Zhao quit finance and founded PROVEN with Dr. Yuan, a computational physicist from Stanford University, who broke the world record for the largest computational simulation on a supercomputer. A graduate of the renowned Y-Combinator startup accelerator, PROVEN formulates personalized skincare products based on data from its proprietary Skin Genome Project, the world’s largest skincare database with information on more than 20,000 ingredients and 100,000 possible hyper-personalized product combinations. Their technology has won PROVEN the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI Technology of the Year award.
“Going Public” aims to democratize public offerings and will follow five companies founded by diverse entrepreneurs on their drama-filled journeys to raise capital from big-name investors and viewers at home alike. Its 10-episode premiere season will be hosted by Lauren Simmons, who was the youngest-ever female trader on the New York Stock Exchange. It will also feature prominent business leaders, including Priceline entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman and Schmidt’s Naturals founder Jaime Schmidt, as mentors.
“The recent frenzy on the stock market has exposed how many Wall Street hedge funds are willing America’s entrepreneurs to fail by short-selling their stock,” says Todd Goldberg, co-creator of “Going Public.” “We need to build companies up, not tear them down, and there’s no better way to do that than helping retail investors participate in the success of great businesses. Ming and Amy are innovative, determined and brilliant entrepreneurs. They exemplify the diverse founders we created ‘Going Public’ to showcase, and we know viewers will be both astounded and inspired by them.”
