From Berkeley to Y Combinator: Lumeria Founders Build the Oura Ring for Skin
When Anthea Guo was a sophomore at UC Berkeley, she developed eczema so severe that she could not sleep for months. Sweat triggered her skin. Rough surfaces could cause a reaction. Swimming became difficult. Waiting for answers was even harder.
“I was just so frustrated at the system,” Guo said.
For Guo, who recently graduated from Berkeley with a B.E. ’26 in EECS and a minor in Bioengineering, the problem was personal. Her younger sister had struggled with eczema since childhood, but it took years for their family to identify a major trigger: dust mites in the carpet at home. Later, when Guo experienced her own skin condition, she began thinking about how software could help people better understand their skin and the triggers hidden in our daily lives.
Maryanne Alhallak, B.A. ’26 in Economics, was approaching the same problem from another angle. While shadowing a dermatologist, she saw how difficult it can be for clinicians to understand the cause of a patient’s flare-up when they only see one moment in time.
The dermatologist was using a dermatoscope, and Alhallak began thinking about the divide between the tools available in clinics and the tools available to everyday people at home.
“I wondered why someone couldn’t just take the same multispectral imaging used for analysis in skincare clinics, apply it into the dermatoscope, and bring it into the home,” Alhallak said.
That question became the foundation for Lumeria, the skin-health startup Guo and Alhallak are now building after graduating from Berkeley. The company recently joined Y Combinator and is developing the Lumoscope, an at-home multispectral phone camera adapter, paired with an AI platform designed to help people track their skin, monitor changes, choose better-suited products, and understand when to seek additional support.
The founders describe the concept as “it’s like the Oura ring but for skin.”
A personal problem with a larger market
Lumeria began with lived experience, but Guo and Alhallak say the company only started to take shape after months of customer discovery.
“It took a lot of customer validation to get to that point,” Alhallak said.
Before building the current product, they interviewed patients, spoke with dermatologists, and tested different versions of the idea. That process helped them sharpen the problem they wanted to solve: skin care technology is still locked behind clinic doors, and therefore lacks objective, longitudinal data from the home.
A dermatologist or skincare app may see a person during a single snapshot, but skin changes constantly. A flare-up can be influenced by products, environment, stress, sweat, allergies, medication, climate, or other daily factors that are hard to reconstruct after the fact.
Alhallak said one of the biggest gaps in the skincare industry is “the concept of longitudinal data.”
Lumeria is designed to help fill that gap. Rather than replacing dermatologists, the founders see the product as a way to give users more agency at home and help them learn what truly drives their skin
What the Lumoscope does
The Lumoscope is a camera adapter that attaches to a phone and captures more than a standard photo. Lumeria’s public materials describe it as a multispectral imaging device that uses RGB, UV, polarized light, and near-infrared imaging to track skin over time.
“It adds a lot more depth, things you just can’t see with the naked eye,” Guo said.
The company’s current website describes the user experience in three steps: users scan with the Lumoscope, answer context questions through an AI interview, and receive AI-powered recommendations with progress tracking. The goal is to make skin monitoring more accurate and standardized than a standard selfie or survey-based skincare app, while also surfacing potential root causes that may be triggering or benefiting your skin that you may never think of.
For Lumeria, the hardware is central. It is what allows the company to capture more objective skin information from home and build an AI platform around that data.
Building from Berkeley
Both founders point to Berkeley and SCET as important parts of their entrepreneurial journey.
Guo came to Berkeley already interested in entrepreneurship, but said the word itself felt intimidating at first. Through SCET, especially the Innovation Fellows program, she began to see entrepreneurship as a practice rather than a title reserved for a select few.
“SCET was able to introduce that to me through the SCET Innovation Fellows and the mindset that anyone can be an entrepreneur by practicing certain principles,” Guo said.
She later worked with SCET staff, participated in the startup ecosystem, and returned as an Innovation Fellow lead, helping other students explore entrepreneurship. She said the community, speaker series, mentors, and student founders around SCET helped make entrepreneurship feel more accessible.
Alhallak also participated in SCET as an Innovation Fellow and through the Innovator in Residence program.
“One thing SCET gets right very well is the emphasis on finding a good problem,” Alhallak said.
That lesson became especially relevant as AI made it easier to build products quickly. For Alhallak, the harder and more important work is understanding what people actually need.
Alhallak also credited Berkeley’s broader entrepreneurship ecosystem, including student communities such as Entrepreneurs at Berkeley, for surrounding them with peers who were also building companies, sharing connections, and pushing one another forward.
“It’s very hard to come to Berkeley and say you want to be an entrepreneur and feel helpless,” she said. “There are so many people who will help you, mentor you, get you to new people, referrals, and tap you into the network.”
The Y Combinator effect
Lumeria’s acceptance into Y Combinator has already changed the founders’ expectations for speed.
Guo said their timeline kept compressing as they went through the process. A goal that once felt like it might take a year began to feel possible in six months, then three months, then one month.
“They continuously push you to have these wild dreams of what’s possible,” Guo said.
Alhallak said “The real value of YC isn’t even the money,” adding that “it’s the community.”
She compared it to being in an environment where everyone around you is training at an extremely high level. That changes what feels normal, and suddenly you’ve broken the mental barrier that prevents you from reaching that same high level
At their first office hours, Alhallak said, their YC partner asked: “Why aren’t you launching next week?”
For the founders, that question captured the culture shift. Lumeria is now focused on working as hard as possible through product testing, data collection, customer feedback, and launch planning.
Skin Companion for All
The founders’ long-term vision reaches beyond a phone attachment.
Alhallak describes Lumeria’s larger mission as “precision medicine for skin.” In the future, she imagines the Lumoscope becoming a common household tool, with each user building a personalized record of how their skin changes over time, how it reacts to different products or environments, and when they may need professional support.
The founders are also interested in how at-home skin tracking could support dermatologists, teledermatology, and clinical research.
For Guo, the mission remains grounded in the experience that first motivated her.
She said one way she thinks about success is “how many lives we’ve changed and how many days of pain we’ve saved.”
The company’s public tagline is “Own your skin story,” a phrase Alhallak also used in the interview to describe the company’s mission.
“It’s about taking that helplessness in between appointments and giving it back to you,” Alhallak said.
Alhallak added that while the technology will continue to evolve, the core problem will remain the focus.
“Understanding the problem always matters more than the solution,” she said.
Advice for student founders
Asked what advice they would give to other Berkeley students interested in starting a company, Guo answered first.
“Be extremely delusional,” she said.
Alhallak added that founders should stay focused on solving a real problem that will change lives. Together, their advice reflects the way Lumeria itself has developed: ambitious in vision, but grounded in customer interviews, clinical feedback, and a problem the founders understand personally.
For Guo and Alhallak, Lumeria is not just about skincare. It is about giving people better tools to understand their own bodies, have the power to take control of their skincare journey all from their home, and building from Berkeley into a company with global ambition.
As Alhallak put it, “Own your skin story.”
When Anthea Guo was a sophomore at UC Berkeley, she developed eczema so severe that she could not sleep for months. Sweat triggered her skin. Rough surfaces could cause a reaction. Swimming became difficult. Waiting for answers was even harder.
“I was just so frustrated at the system,” Guo said.
For Guo, who recently graduated from Berkeley with a B.E. ’26 in EECS and a minor in Bioengineering, the problem was personal. Her younger sister had struggled with eczema since childhood, but it took years for their family to identify a major trigger: dust mites in the carpet at home. Later, when Guo experienced her own skin condition, she began thinking about how software could help people better understand their skin and the triggers hidden in our daily lives.
Maryanne Alhallak, B.A. ’26 in Economics, was approaching the same problem from another angle. While shadowing a dermatologist, she saw how difficult it can be for clinicians to understand the cause of a patient’s flare-up when they only see one moment in time.
The dermatologist was using a dermatoscope, and Alhallak began thinking about the divide between the tools available in clinics and the tools available to everyday people at home.
“I wondered why someone couldn’t just take the same multispectral imaging used for analysis in skincare clinics, apply it into the dermatoscope, and bring it into the home,” Alhallak said.
That question became the foundation for Lumeria, the skin-health startup Guo and Alhallak are now building after graduating from Berkeley. The company recently joined Y Combinator and is developing the Lumoscope, an at-home multispectral phone camera adapter, paired with an AI platform designed to help people track their skin, monitor changes, choose better-suited products, and understand when to seek additional support.
The founders describe the concept as “it’s like the Oura ring but for skin.”
A personal problem with a larger market
Lumeria began with lived experience, but Guo and Alhallak say the company only started to take shape after months of customer discovery.
“It took a lot of customer validation to get to that point,” Alhallak said.
Before building the current product, they interviewed patients, spoke with dermatologists, and tested different versions of the idea. That process helped them sharpen the problem they wanted to solve: skin care technology is still locked behind clinic doors, and therefore lacks objective, longitudinal data from the home.
A dermatologist or skincare app may see a person during a single snapshot, but skin changes constantly. A flare-up can be influenced by products, environment, stress, sweat, allergies, medication, climate, or other daily factors that are hard to reconstruct after the fact.
Alhallak said one of the biggest gaps in the skincare industry is “the concept of longitudinal data.”
Lumeria is designed to help fill that gap. Rather than replacing dermatologists, the founders see the product as a way to give users more agency at home and help them learn what truly drives their skin
What the Lumoscope does
The Lumoscope is a camera adapter that attaches to a phone and captures more than a standard photo. Lumeria’s public materials describe it as a multispectral imaging device that uses RGB, UV, polarized light, and near-infrared imaging to track skin over time.
“It adds a lot more depth, things you just can’t see with the naked eye,” Guo said.
The company’s current website describes the user experience in three steps: users scan with the Lumoscope, answer context questions through an AI interview, and receive AI-powered recommendations with progress tracking. The goal is to make skin monitoring more accurate and standardized than a standard selfie or survey-based skincare app, while also surfacing potential root causes that may be triggering or benefiting your skin that you may never think of.
For Lumeria, the hardware is central. It is what allows the company to capture more objective skin information from home and build an AI platform around that data.
Building from Berkeley
Both founders point to Berkeley and SCET as important parts of their entrepreneurial journey.
Guo came to Berkeley already interested in entrepreneurship, but said the word itself felt intimidating at first. Through SCET, especially the Innovation Fellows program, she began to see entrepreneurship as a practice rather than a title reserved for a select few.
“SCET was able to introduce that to me through the SCET Innovation Fellows and the mindset that anyone can be an entrepreneur by practicing certain principles,” Guo said.
She later worked with SCET staff, participated in the startup ecosystem, and returned as an Innovation Fellow lead, helping other students explore entrepreneurship. She said the community, speaker series, mentors, and student founders around SCET helped make entrepreneurship feel more accessible.
Alhallak also participated in SCET as an Innovation Fellow and through the Innovator in Residence program.
“One thing SCET gets right very well is the emphasis on finding a good problem,” Alhallak said.
That lesson became especially relevant as AI made it easier to build products quickly. For Alhallak, the harder and more important work is understanding what people actually need.
Alhallak also credited Berkeley’s broader entrepreneurship ecosystem, including student communities such as Entrepreneurs at Berkeley, for surrounding them with peers who were also building companies, sharing connections, and pushing one another forward.
“It’s very hard to come to Berkeley and say you want to be an entrepreneur and feel helpless,” she said. “There are so many people who will help you, mentor you, get you to new people, referrals, and tap you into the network.”
The Y Combinator effect
Lumeria’s acceptance into Y Combinator has already changed the founders’ expectations for speed.
Guo said their timeline kept compressing as they went through the process. A goal that once felt like it might take a year began to feel possible in six months, then three months, then one month.
“They continuously push you to have these wild dreams of what’s possible,” Guo said.
Alhallak said “The real value of YC isn’t even the money,” adding that “it’s the community.”
She compared it to being in an environment where everyone around you is training at an extremely high level. That changes what feels normal, and suddenly you’ve broken the mental barrier that prevents you from reaching that same high level
At their first office hours, Alhallak said, their YC partner asked: “Why aren’t you launching next week?”
For the founders, that question captured the culture shift. Lumeria is now focused on working as hard as possible through product testing, data collection, customer feedback, and launch planning.
Skin Companion for All
The founders’ long-term vision reaches beyond a phone attachment.
Alhallak describes Lumeria’s larger mission as “precision medicine for skin.” In the future, she imagines the Lumoscope becoming a common household tool, with each user building a personalized record of how their skin changes over time, how it reacts to different products or environments, and when they may need professional support.
The founders are also interested in how at-home skin tracking could support dermatologists, teledermatology, and clinical research.
For Guo, the mission remains grounded in the experience that first motivated her.
She said one way she thinks about success is “how many lives we’ve changed and how many days of pain we’ve saved.”
The company’s public tagline is “Own your skin story,” a phrase Alhallak also used in the interview to describe the company’s mission.
“It’s about taking that helplessness in between appointments and giving it back to you,” Alhallak said.
Alhallak added that while the technology will continue to evolve, the core problem will remain the focus.
“Understanding the problem always matters more than the solution,” she said.
Advice for student founders
Asked what advice they would give to other Berkeley students interested in starting a company, Guo answered first.
“Be extremely delusional,” she said.
Alhallak added that founders should stay focused on solving a real problem that will change lives. Together, their advice reflects the way Lumeria itself has developed: ambitious in vision, but grounded in customer interviews, clinical feedback, and a problem the founders understand personally.
For Guo and Alhallak, Lumeria is not just about skincare. It is about giving people better tools to understand their own bodies, have the power to take control of their skincare journey all from their home, and building from Berkeley into a company with global ambition.
As Alhallak put it, “Own your skin story.”