Yesterday, the HEC Paris business school announced a startup accelerator program with Goal and L’Oréal Group, whose goal is to support creativity and inclusion in the blockchain and metaverse ecosystem.

The program will take place at the STATION F startup campus in Paris and will support five entrepreneurial startups from January to June 2023, selected by a jury of experts from Meta and L’Oréal. The five startups will receive the support of Incubateur HEC Paris during the six months. L’Oréal has been a long-standing corporate partner of HEC Paris, and the beauty company’s president also chairs the university.

Selected startups will include projects focused on technologies such as 3D production and AR/VR/MR technologies, avatar creation and portability, user experience and Web3 themes, including areas such as the token economy.

“Creators are at the heart of the metaverse,” said Asmita Dubey, chief marketing and digital officer for L’Oréal. “The program aims to support and empower the ecosystem that will build it, and that can pave the way to go beyond storytelling, to a living brand story, in line with our values, to be inclusive, diverse and sustainable by design.

Until now, Meta’s metaverse journey has had a minimal focus on Web3 technologies. The company’s priority is mainly virtual reality after its regulatory setbacks with cryptocurrencies diem project (Formerly Libra), and its rebranding to Goal. However, recently Meta started supporting non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Facebook and Instagram launched features that allow users to display and mint NFTs on their social media platforms.

This isn’t L’Oréal’s first effort in Web3 or the metaverse. In 2021, L’Oréal launched a NFT campaign celebrating women with designs by female artists. The initiative aimed to highlight the underrepresentation of women in the NFT sector to attract more female buyers and artists. Most recently, L’Oréal subsidiary NYX Cosmetics partnered with metaverse The Sandbox and People of Crypto (POC) to launch a avatar collection in celebration of Pride Month.