Skincare is a massive global business, and the industry is always looking for ways to answer a basic question: how well the products people buy actually work in real life. While much of health has moved toward hard data, the skin remains a category difficult to measure objectively.

Shakiba Kaveh, the brain behind Mitra Bio, has spent close to a decade trying to present an accessible solution. A researcher and Cambridge-trained scientist, she’s built a way to read skin biology without cutting into it, and now, she’s preparing to put that tool into consumers’ hands.

A scientist’s frustration

The founder and chief executive of Mitra Bio, Kaveh has treated the beauty industry as a scientist first. She earned a PhD in materials science at Cambridge before taking her first job at L’Oréal in Paris, on a research campus devoted entirely to skin and hair. The work put her among high-tech instruments and deep in the science of cosmetics at one of the industry’s biggest names.

Her assignment sounded simple but proved anything but: find a biomarker that could prove whether sunscreen actually worked.

That task exposed a problem that would follow her for years. Reading what happens inside skin, without cutting into it, was much harder than skincare’s marketing let on. The gap between what products claimed and what anyone could prove bothered her on a personal level, too. A lifelong user of skincare who says she has never wanted her skin to age, she wanted evidence behind what she bought and kept coming up empty. “My personal motivation was to make the marketing of skincare scientific,” she says.

She then spent a few years in management consulting, then joined the Entrepreneur First accelerator in 2020, where Mitra Bio began taking shape.

The sampling problem

Kaveh’s starting point is blunt: skincare is a large industry in which it’s difficult to prove whether products work. Efficacy, she argues, is often judged subjectively, by looking in the mirror, rather than through biological measurements.

“Skincare is a $200 billion market, but that’s not a guarantee that all final products are efficient or work as advertised,” she says. Kaveh contrasts that with the rest of the wellness landscape, where a growing share of U.S. adults now rely on wearables, blood tests, and microbiome kits to monitor their health. Skin, she argues, has been left without any comparable tools for objective tracking.

The reason, she says, comes down to a sampling problem. Reading skin biology has often required punch biopsies or photos and visual inspection, which, while often helpful, don’t always offer the necessary insight into what is actually happening beneath the surface.

She ran into that wall herself early in her career, where she was asked to develop a biomarker to prove whether sunscreen worked and found firsthand how hard non-invasive measurement is. Later interviews with other researchers turned up the same unsolved challenge everywhere: finding biomarkers and selecting ingredients that genuinely work.

Kaveh points out that companies spend millions a year dealing with these discrepancies. Her answer was to sample live human skin directly instead of testing ingredients on cells grown in a petri dish, a model that may be flawed from the start. She remains critical of an industry she sees as heavily dependent on marketing language, and argues that claims about whether skincare actually works are not always independently verified, saying, “We are living in a world of marketing jargon when it comes to wellness.” 

This is what led to the creation of Mitra Bio.

Mitra Bio’s goal: reading skin without a needle

Mitra Bio’s test lifts skin cells painlessly with an adhesive patch pressed to the skin. Those cells are sequenced to read their DNA and epigenetic information, returning a biological picture of skin aging, inflammation, and UV damage. “We’ve developed a non-invasive epigenetic skin test that removes your skin cells with an adhesive patch,” Kaveh explains.

At the core is what the company describes as an epigenetic clock built from skin keratinocytes. It’s a set of genes whose methylation patterns shift in step with a person’s skin age. From a sample alone, without knowing whose skin it came from, the test is designed to estimate skin age, degree of photodamage, and, according to the company, signals related to skin cancer.

The science behind it is published in npj Aging, and the company says aspects of the technology are patent-pending. Mitra Bio also says its platform is used by leading skincare and pharmaceutical companies. Many of them rely on it for clinical trials where taking a biopsy is impractical. For years, that kept Mitra Bio a business-to-business platform for dermatologists and researchers.

Now the company is taking it to consumers for the first time. The process is meant to be simple: a customer orders a kit, self-samples the forehead at home, mails it to a lab in the U.S., and gets results within four weeks. The report comes with recommendations across skincare, lifestyle, and interventions, and the company claims it can help people track whether their treatments are helping to lower their measured skin age.

A pre-launch beta is set for November 2026 in the U.S., opening to roughly 100 people from the waitlist, each of whom also gets a 20-minute session with a skin coach. Behind the product is a team of 15 scientists and engineers, backed by investors and dermatology advisers.

Expanding the product

Building on that product, Kaveh sees the test as the first step toward something bigger. She calls it a “skin longevity concierge,” a service that focuses on an outcome rather than a short-term promise. The model already exists in other corners of health, she points out, in companies addressing menopause or weight loss that stay with a customer until they get a result. Skincare, she argues, has nothing like it.

Her reasons run deeper than any single product. She wants to disrupt the industry and improve human health over the long term, and she frames the stakes plainly: half of all people will deal with a skin condition in their lifetime, whether it’s acne or skin cancer. To her, that is too big a number to leave to a subjective eye.

With non-invasive access to skin biology, Mitra Bio could sample millions of people and learn how different treatments actually affect the skin. Kaveh’s also honest that selling it is a different job from building it. She treats commercialization as a second “zero to one,” and she is putting a consumer team together the way she ran the lab, through trial, error, and constant market experimentation.

Shakiba Kaveh’s belief of proof over promises

For all its scientific grounding, Mitra Bio’s pitch comes down to something simple: replacing what people believe about their skin with what can actually be measured. Shakiba Kaveh has spent the better part of a decade turning that idea from a lab result into a product, and the upcoming beta will be the first real test of whether consumers want the answer as much as she does. If they do, a market long run on marketing may finally have a way to check its own claims.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.