From a dream to award-winning skincare

ÄIO’s fermentation-derived ingredients make their mark. Two international beauty awards, two sustainability award nominations and three commercial skincare ingredients. The latest recognitions mark an important milestone: biotechnology developed in the laboratory is now reaching consumers through finished products and gaining recognition across the cosmetics industry.

It started with a dream

In Estonian folklore, ÄIO is associated with the god of dreams. When we founded ÄIO in 2022, the name reflected an ambitious dream of our co-founders, Dr. Nemailla Bonturi and Professor Petri-Jaan Lahtvee: to change how the world produces fats and oils. Fats and oils are essential ingredients in countless everyday products, from skincare to food. Yet conventional production often depends on agricultural land, water-intensive crops and supply chains vulnerable to climate and environmental pressures.

We believed biotechnology could offer another way. At ÄIO, we use proprietary microorganism and fermentation technology to transform low-value industrial side streams into high-value fats and oils. Instead of relying solely on agricultural crops or animal sources, we cultivate specialised yeast in controlled bioreactors to produce functional lipid ingredients. Four years later, that dream is becoming commercial reality.

Our three cosmetic ingredients, FERMIRA™ RedOil, ZymaLipid and Encapsulated oil, are commercially available, COSMOS, NATRUE and Vegan certified, and supported by an international distribution network. Most importantly, our ingredients are no longer only being tested in laboratories or presented as formulation concepts. They are already part of finished skincare products available to consumers. And those products are now receiving international recognition.

European Natural Beauty Awards: Excellence and Top 3 for Formula Innovation

One of the latest milestones comes from our collaboration with Estonian natural skincare brand tilk!.

The tilk! Skin Booster Bio-Fermented Face Cream, formulated with two ÄIO ingredients: FERMIRA™ RedOil and ZymaLipid, alongside bakuchiol, has received an Excellence Award at the European Natural Beauty Awards 2026. The cream was also named among the Top 3 nominees for Formula Innovation of the Year.

The European Natural Beauty Awards focus on the quality, performance and credibility of natural beauty products. Their evaluation process includes an ingredient review, a minimum requirement of 99% natural-origin ingredients and approximately 90 days of real-life product testing. An international jury of 100 members from 35 countries brings together industry experts, media representatives and consumer perspectives.

The Excellence recognition is awarded to products achieving high scores for quality and performance, while the Formula Innovation nomination highlights particularly interesting advances in cosmetic formulation.

The Formula Innovation nomination is especially meaningful. FERMIRA™ RedOil is a fermentation-derived bioactive oil naturally rich in carotenoids, polyphenols and sterols. ZymaLipid is a high-purity fatty acid complex designed to provide emollience, skin barrier support and formulation functionality. Bringing these two ingredients together in one finished skincare product demonstrates how fermentation-derived lipids can contribute to modern cosmetic formulations.

The recognition belongs to the complete product and the work of the tilk! formulation team. For ÄIO, it provides an important commercial case study of how our ingredients can be successfully integrated into an award-recognised formulation.

Global Green Beauty Awards: GOLD for Best Natural Moisturiser

The second recognition comes from another tilk! product, the Skin Booster Serum with Bio-Fermented ÄIO RedOil, Hyaluronic Acid, Algae and Black Currant Seed Oil. The serum has won GOLD in the Best Natural Moisturiser category at the 2026 Global Green Beauty Awards.

The Global Green Beauty Awards are an international beauty awards programme dedicated to recognising natural, organic, vegan and environmentally conscious beauty products. The competition evaluates finished products across a broad range of skincare, haircare and personal care categories, with attention to both product performance and green credentials. Winning Gold in a competitive consumer skincare category is an achievement for tilk! and encouraging milestone for ÄIO.

The serum was the first commercially launched skincare product containing ÄIO’s FERMIRA™ RedOil, introduced in April 2026. Its launch marked our transition from supplying experimental ingredients for development work to seeing our biotechnology reach consumers in a finished cosmetic product. The Gold award demonstrates that formulations incorporating new biotechnology-derived ingredients can compete for recognition alongside established natural beauty products.

Sustainable Beauty Awards: Two finalist nominations for ÄIO

While our ingredients are receiving recognition through finished products, ÄIO itself has also been selected as a finalist in two categories at the 2026 Sustainable Beauty Awards:

• Sustainable Ingredient, FERMIRA™ RedOil, the nomination recognises the innovation and sustainability potential of FERMIRA™ RedOil, a functional cosmetic ingredient produced through fermentation using upcycled feedstocks.
• Sustainability Start-Up, ÄIO, the nomination considers the broader company: our technology, business model, scalability and contribution to more sustainable ingredient production.

Organised by Ecovia Intelligence, a London-based research and consulting organisation specialising in sustainable industries, the Sustainable Beauty Awards have recognised sustainability excellence in the international cosmetics and personal care sector since 2013. The awards are held alongside the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit, which brings together ingredient manufacturers, cosmetic brands, researchers and sustainability specialists to discuss the future of the beauty industry.

Previous award recipients include established ingredient companies such as Clariant’s Lucas Meyer Cosmetics and Croda Beauty, as well as fermentation-based biotechnology company C16 Biosciences.

The winners will be announced on 27 October 2026 in Paris.

From three ingredients to commercial skincare

Behind these awards is a development journey that started long before the first product appeared on a store shelf.

ÄIO’s technology grew out of university research into microbial oil production. Since founding the company in 2022, our team has worked to develop the technology, improve production processes, scale fermentation, analyse ingredient functionality and prepare our products for commercial markets.

Today, our cosmetic portfolio includes three ingredients with different functional profiles:

• FERMIRA™ RedOil, a carotenoid-rich bioactive oil supporting skin hydration, renewal and barrier defence.
• ZymaLipid, a high-purity fatty acid complex combining emollience, texture enhancement and skin barrier support.
• Encapsulated oil, a multifunctional lipid-rich powder containing naturally occurring bioactive compounds, with potential applications in moisturising, antioxidant and skin barrier formulations.

All three ingredients are commercially available and certified under COSMOS and Vegan standards. Our collaboration with tilk! has already resulted in two commercial skincare products. Another Estonian skincare brand, JOIK, has introduced its RE-BOOST GLOW oil serum featuring FERMIRA™ RedOil. Also Alison Skincare, an indiebrand from US has the first commercial products out on the market.

These partnerships demonstrate something that laboratory data alone cannot: our ingredients can move through real formulation development and become part of commercially available consumer products.

The dream is now a reality

Our dream has always been bigger than one ingredient or one award. It is to make sustainably produced fats and oils a practical choice for industries around the world. We started ÄIO with a dream to make fats and oils differently, and today, that dream has moved beyond the laboratory. We have scaled our fermentation technology, introduced three commercial cosmetic ingredients, built an international distribution network and worked with skincare brands to bring new formulations to market. Now, those products and the technology behind them are receiving recognition from different parts of the international beauty industry.

We are grateful to tilk!, JOIK, our distributors, research partners and the ÄIO team for helping make this progress possible. The next challenge is to bring these ingredients to more brands, more formulations and larger production volumes.

Interested in developing your next cosmetic formulation with ÄIO ingredients?

Explore FERMIRA™ RedOil, ZymaLipid and Encapsulated il at aio.bio/cosmetics or contact ÄIO and our global distribution partners.