The 5-year-old owner of haircare and skincare brand SpoiledChild and makeup brand Il Makiage may not really be a beauty company at all, at least according to it. Oddity has billed itself as a consumer tech platform building digital-first brands. SpoiledChild features a proprietary machine learning engine that directs customers to the right products for them, and Il Makiage’s PowerMatch online shade-matching quiz has removed a barrier to e-commerce sales of complexion products.

In April, Oddity invested $100 million to scoop up Revela as artificial intelligence was whipping up a frenzy. Revela harnesses AI to discover molecules with beauty and wellness applications. Oddity also houses Kenzza, a beauty media content library, and Hyperspectral Vision, a computer vision specialist. The company boasts over 40 million unique users and 1 billion data points. In fiscal year 2022, Oddity generated $324.5 million in sales and $21.7 million in net income.

The company’s tech-forward positioning has been a hit with investors. Its initial public offering went off with a bang on Wednesday of last week to give it a roughly $2.7 billion valuation or a 33X multiple of its $81.62 million earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). Now trading on the NASDAQ, its shares closed at $49.13 on Thursday, up from $47.53 on the day it IPO’d, which represented a 40% premium on the share price it had set.

While not quibbling that Oddity’s public market debut was impressive, some beauty industry insiders are quibbling with its pitch. They argue Oddity is very much a beauty company. In a tweet, for example, Kiva Dickinson, managing partner of Selva Ventures, backer of Crown Affair, Cake, One Skin, Kinship and Arrae, writes it’s a beauty company “trading at a beauty EBITDA multiple (L’Oreal 24x / Estée Lauder 30x)…Having data-informed product dev does not make you tech…Calling this a tech company is how we got in the DTC bubble in the first place.”

To get others’ takes on what Oddity is and isn’t, for the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked 12 beauty investors, investment bankers, entrepreneurs and executives the following questions: Do you think Oddity is a technology company, DTC company or beauty company? Does the answer matter for future beauty M&A and the strategies beauty companies are pursuing?