Jul 27, 2025
Gaston Otarola Pezzani, Co-founder & CTO
Gaston Otarola Pezzani, Co-founder & CTO
Gaston, CTO at Urava.
"Most “beauty tech” is just packaging-level innovation. A new applicator. A shinier device. A patch that looks futuristic but behaves like a sticker. And a lot of language about “delivery” without ever answering the real question: delivery of what, to where, and with what control? The problem isn’t that any of that is bad. The problem is that it doesn’t feel engineered. It doesn’t feel biological. It doesn’t feel like someone built it with the body in mind."
Gaston’s career has a pattern: he keeps choosing the hardest possible way to solve a problem—by making it alive.
He started as a biomedical engineer obsessed with tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, the kind of work where “materials” aren’t just materials—they’re living systems you have to coax, train, and protect. That obsession took him into building living implants for orthopedics, where the goal isn’t to patch damage, but to help the body actually rebuild. Then he went to Wildtype, leading RD&I teams on cell-grown salmon—because if you can grow real tissue that looks, behaves, and performs like the original, you’re learning the same fundamental lesson: cells already know how to do the job… if you give them the right environment.
Somewhere along the way, he also developed a hyper-sensitive genetically engineered bioassay for toxin detection—a “canary in the coal mine” built from biology itself. Different application, same mindset: use cells as the most precise technology we have.
That’s why URAVA makes sense for him. He’s not here to make skincare louder. He’s here to make it deeper—to build a delivery platform that speaks the language of biology, and lets regeneration do what it’s always been capable of doing.
