Parallel Health launches with $2.3M and a phage serum matched to eight skin types

Parallel Health sells a mail-in skin microbiome test and a serum with phages chosen for the customer's skin type.

Skin-microbiome testing can sort people into eight types, each treated with a custom phage serum that targets its problem bacteria.

$2.3 million pre-seed funding, revealed at launch.

Natalise Kalea Robinson and Nathan Brown began at a larger cosmetics company trying to prove phage therapy works for chronic skin conditions. They found some people benefited profoundly and others not at all, and concluded a serum customised for each user was needed. That veered too far into biotech for the parent company, so they founded Parallel.

They recruited people aged 18 to 87 from every US state to swab face and body, and Kalea Robinson says 90% of the microbes cultured were novel against public databases. From the data they defined eight skin types. Customers swab and mail a kit, analysis runs via Illumina, and a phage-infused serum is made for their type; users retest every six months or so because the microbiome shifts.

The service went live with orders shipping on launch and thousands on a waiting list. The founders say the growing data set is their moat, said they were approached to be acquired for it before they were a year old, and had no plan beyond license talks to move into therapeutics.

The cosmetics-company trial showed uneven results, which pointed to personalised phage mixes.

No reference existed for a normal skin microbiome, so they built their own data set.

Eight types balanced scientific accuracy with a consumer-friendly product.

Selling a serum, not a therapy, kept the company in skincare rather than regulated treatment.

By turning each customer's test into a data point, the founders built a proprietary skin-microbiome data set while selling a skincare product rather than a regulated drug.

As of 2023-09-20 the service was live with a waiting list of thousands, per the company; efficacy was not independently reported and no revenue was given.