American tech-driven beauty brand IL MAKIAGE has acquired Israeli deep-tech AI-based computational imaging startup Voyage81 for $40m. IL MAKIAGE, which is based in New York City's Soho area, was relaunched in 2018 by brother and sister duo Oran Holtzman and Shiran Holtzman-Erel. Two years later, the company became the fastest-growing online beauty brand in the United States. Voyage81 developed the only patented software in the world that gives smartphones hyperspectral imaging capabilities. Where a normal smartphone photo detects three wavelengths of color, Voyage81's software can detect 31.

On the second floor of a small office building in the middle of Tel Aviv, the bustling heart of Israel's booming tech industry, sits the world headquarters for Cortica, an AI company with the ambitious goal of getting machines to see the world as well as we do. They are one of hundreds of AI startups that have sprouted up all over the world in the last few years. The global AI market has now exceeded a billion dollars and the tech giants are racing to acquire them as they are re-positioning themselves as AI companies first. But it's a convoluted space with a high knowledge barrier of entry. Most of these companies use buzz words like'machine learning', 'deep learning' or'neural networks' knowing that most consumers and investors have no idea what they really mean. For someone without a background in the field it can be hard to distinguish substance from snake oil.