TL;DRHaloBraid raised $7M from Seven Seven Six to build a robotic braiding assistant for salons, launching later this year.
HaloBraid, a robotics startup that builds an automated braiding assistant for hair salons, has raised seven million dollars in a seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six. The device works alongside professional stylists rather than replacing them: a braider starts each braid by hand and then hands off to HaloBraid, which finishes the rest in seconds. The company plans to launch its first product in salons later this year.
Founder Yinka Ogunbiyi, who holds an MS in engineering and an MBA from Harvard, came to the problem during the COVID-19 pandemic when she tried braiding her own hair in her London apartment. It took her four days. Ogunbiyi had previously founded a smart cooking appliance company, and she began approaching braiding as an engineering challenge, studying the mechanics of a process that has remained manual for thousands of years.
The scale of the market is larger than most outsiders would guess. In her research, Ogunbiyi found that people spend an estimated eight billion hours braiding hair annually, and in a survey of 2,000 people, 95 percent said they would get their hair braided more often if the process took less time. A single braiding session can last anywhere from six to 12 hours, limiting stylists to one or two clients per day.
