May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPI), and while the contributions of the AAPI community deserve recognition year-round, this month offers a specific opportunity to look at who is actually building the future of the industries shaping how we look, feel and care for ourselves. Beauty, wellness and fashion are three of the most personal categories in consumer culture, but they are also the most homogenous at the founder level.

The four entrepreneurs profiled here have strong understanding of the markets and how it should serve a diverse demographic, especially from those within the AAPI community. They have built companies with real clinical foundations or generational craft knowledge, and growth numbers that would turn heads in any boardroom. AAPI Heritage Month is a reminder that there are individuals out there who are making a real difference to create products and services that make a deep impact.

Nimisha Mandaliya, An AAPI Founder Uses Jewelry To Tell Her Story

Nimisha Mandaliya grew up watching her family shape gold by hand in Pune, India. Four generations of jewelry making informed a kind of craft knowledge that cannot be acquired in a design school. Now based in London, she has channelled that inheritance into Nimmisha, a newly launched demi-fine jewelry brand sitting in the £50 to £600 ($67-$800) price range and competing directly with some of the UK market's most aesthetically polished names.

What those competitors have not claimed is the territory Mandaliya built Nimmisha on. No British demi-fine brand has planted its flag in Vedic knowledge or South Asian diaspora identity. The landscape, as she describes it, is full of aesthetically strong, culturally generic brands. Nimmisha is neither. Its positioning, "Wear Your Story," speaks to a buyer who wants jewelry that means something, and the data supports that appetite. The demi-fine market size in 2025 was estimated at USD 3.59 billion , and women are statistically making the most purchases for themselves, with milestone self-gifting now the fastest-growing purchase trigger in UK premium jewelry. British Vogue named Nimmisha “modern heirlooms”, with consumers increasingly asking whether a piece will last decades, carry personal meaning, and be worth passing down.

The timing extends to trend. Pearl and mother of pearl are the biggest jewelry category of 2026, with searches up 155% on Pinterest. Nimmisha stocks freshwater pearls and is designed to sit at exactly that intersection of personal meaning and cultural specificity, a space no competitor has yet occupied.For Mandaliya, the brand is also a statement about representation at the founding level. "Fine jewelery has celebrated Indian craft for centuries while rarely celebrating Indian founders," she tells me over email. "I didn’t launch Nimmisha to fill a niche, but to change who gets to sit at that table."

Keon Zhang Founded An AAPI-Led Clean Beauty Company Built on Real Performance

Keon Zhang spent years at L'Oréal before concluding that the clean beauty space had a credibility problem. Brands leaned on natural marketing without necessarily delivering natural performance. Zhang founded Klay & Co. to close that gap, building a parent company whose brands deliver products that are vegan, cruelty-free, plant-based and formulated without SLS, parabens or silicones. His flagship brand, Back To Earth, sits at the centre of that mission.

The market he entered is substantial and accelerating. The US beauty and personal care sector is valued at approximately $109 billion and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 2.5% over the next five years, outpacing projected GDP growth of 2.0%. Within that, the clean and sustainable beauty segment is expected to significantly outperform the broader category, with a projected compound annual rate of 10.8% over the same period. The consumer driving that growth is values-led rather than age-specific, someone seeking cleaner lifestyles, toxin-free formulations and wellness solutions rooted in nature, but unwilling to trade down on results.

Four years in, Klay & Co. has posted repeat purchase rates three to four times higher than industry averages, a metric that reflects genuine product satisfaction rather than one-time curiosity. That retention number is particularly meaningful in a category where consumers are becoming increasingly educated about ingredient lists and increasingly skeptical of brands that rely on natural marketing without substantiating it.

"A longstanding consumer perception in beauty and wellness is that performance and natural ingredients are mutually exclusive, that highly effective products must rely on synthetic or chemical-heavy formulations," he shares over email. "I am leveraging advances in formulation technology alongside the best ingredients from nature to create products that are clean." For Zhang, as for many AAPI founders building in this space, the work is shifting the messaging while creating products that are actually helpful.

AAPI Founder Jack Jia Is Behind Telehealth Platform Musely

Jack Jia was born in China and founded Musely with a clear-eyed diagnosis of what the American healthcare system gets wrong. Built for crises rather than quality of life, it had left an enormous population underserved. “Because beauty, hormonal wellness, longevity , and aging affect nearly 100 percent of the population, insurance providers cannot afford to cover the entire demographic,” he states over email. This creates an innovation vacuum. That access-first philosophy, building clinical rigour into something affordable and direct, is precisely the kind of model AAPI Heritage Month asks us to pay attention to.

Musely was built to change that. The platform blends dermatology, longevity science and AI-powered care into a single personalized experience, using a physician-guided, vertically integrated model and an age-old compounding methodology to deliver clinical-grade products directly to the consumer. Its AI-driven eNurse provides continuous treatment oversight rather than one-time prescriptions. Alongside prescription skincare, Musely has moved into ingestible treatments like The Skin Pill, targeting cellular health from the inside out and positioning itself within the longevity market, which analysts project will exceed $50 billion as preventative bioscience enters the mainstream.

The scale Jia has built is significant. Musely has served more than 1.2 million patients and recently secured $360 million in financing through General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. What makes that milestone particularly notable is the path that preceded it. After raising approximately $28 million in equity in 2014, the company did not seek additional equity capital for more than a decade. Instead it scaled while remaining cash-flow positive, growing roughly 50% year over year, a track record that is almost anomalous in the venture-backed world.

"Unlike competitors which have focused for a decade on the youth acne market, Musely serves women and men aged 30 to 90," Jia adds. "We address the complex cosmetic and physiological conditions associated with biological aging."

Avara By AAPI Dr. Dhivya Srinivasa Fills A Gap Of Beauty That Does Not Exist

Dr. Dhivya Srinivasa is a breast reconstructive microsurgeon. She spent years working with women whose bodies had been profoundly changed by cancer treatment and saw, in parallel, that the beauty industry had nothing meaningful to offer them. For instance, there is no dedicated shelf at Sephora or a curated pharmacy section for the consumer whose skin concerns are rooted in health over aesthetics. The woman navigating chemotherapy, IVF, menopause or autoimmune disease was, in beauty retail terms, invisible.

Avara is her answer to that absence. The brand is formulated for sensitive skin affected by cancer treatment, hormonal disruption, post-procedure recovery and chronic inflammation, and it sits within a target demographic of women aged 30 to 65 moving through some of the most physically and emotionally demanding experiences of their lives. Srinivasa describes what she is building as health-inclusive beauty, a category she argues does not yet exist in any meaningful commercial form. "The beauty industry has historically prioritized aspirational aesthetics over real life health experiences," she says over email. "Millions of consumers feel overlooked because their skin concerns are connected to broader health realities rather than conventional cosmetic goals."

The growth Avara has posted in its first year makes an unambiguous case for the demand. The brand moved from approximately $305,000 in total 2024 sales to more than $747,000 in trailing twelve-month revenue, a year-over-year increase of over 3,300%. In the most recent 90-day period alone, Avara generated more than $480,000 in sales with 137% growth, and the most recent 30-day period exceeded $220,000. Srinivasa is self-funded. Ninety-one percent of customers who purchase one product return to try another or buy again, a retention figure that speaks to how badly this consumer has wanted to be seen.

"What makes Avara unique is that we are creating a new segment centered around health inclusivity," Srinivasa says. "This includes consumers experiencing treatment-related skin sensitivity, chronic inflammation, hormonal disruption, aging concerns, post-procedure recovery, and other medically adjacent skin challenges that legacy beauty brands have largely ignored." In a month dedicated to recognizing what AAPI founders bring to industries that have long excluded them, Avara is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when someone with the right expertise and the right lived proximity to a problem simply decides to solve it.