Beauty technology has spent the last decade focused on diagnostics, personalization, and devices. From AI-powered skin analysis to at-home laser treatments, innovation has largely concentrated on skincare, haircare, and wellness. Yet, hair braiding, one of the industry’s most time-intensive services, has remained almost entirely unchanged. This disconnect is what Yinka Ogunbiyi, founder of hair technology company Halo, believes is one of the industry's biggest untapped opportunities.
The beauty technology startup announced it raised a $7 million seed round led by Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm 776, with participation from Bling Capital and AlleyCorp. The funding will support the rollout of HaloBraid, an automated braiding assistant designed to help stylists complete braids in roughly half the time.
The investment is notable not only for the size of the round but also for the growing investor confidence in a category that has historically been overlooked by both technology companies and venture capital.
Hair braiding represents an estimated $11 billion global market. In the US alone, there are over 1 million hair-braiding salons, with millions of braiding appointments annually. Despite that scale, the category remains dependent on lengthy manual processes that can leave clients spending entire days in a salon chair and stylists managing significant physical strain.
For Ogunbiyi, the opportunity came from personal experience. “Each year, 8 billion hours are spent braiding hair. That's such an absurd amount of time,” she said to BeautyMatter.
The idea for Halo was born during the pandemic, when Ogunbiyi, a biomechanical engineer and serial hardware entrepreneur, attempted to braid her own hair while she was living in London. “It was the first time I’d ever braided my hair myself, small knotless braids down to my waist. It took me four days,” she said.
The experience reshaped how she saw a service she’d known her whole life. By the second day, she began separating braiding's artistic elements from its mechanical ones.“I realized that starting the braid [and] parting the hair is an art. It’s really hard to do,” she explained. “But finishing the braid is pretty manual and repetitive. It felt like sewing by hand, and the sewing machine was invented hundreds of years ago.”
That observation became the foundation for Halo’s business thesis. Rather than attempting to automate the entire braiding process, Halo focused on the repetitive braid-finishing stage. Stylists remain responsible for sectioning the hair, creating patterns, determining braid placement, and beginning each braid. HaloBraid then completes the remainder of the braid using its integrated technology.
Before committing to the idea, Ogunbiyi immersed herself in research. She reviewed patents, studied braiding technologies, and interviewed more than 200 braid wearers and professional braiders. What she discovered was a category constrained by time.
“I spoke with braid wearers who were sacrificing their weekends or PTO days, missing birthday parties, to get their hair braided,” she revealed. “I spoke with stylists who dipped their hands in ice at the end of each day, started appointments at 11 pm on a Friday night, or were retraining to leave the braiding industry altogether.”
For Ogunbiyi, the problem wasn’t a lack of demand, but the industry’s ability to meet it. “My ultimate goal is to give people this time back, because we see time as the ultimate luxury.”
Halo is entering a market that has experienced significant growth in recent years as protective styling has become increasingly mainstream. Yet, growing demand has also exposed operational challenges. Many professional braiders are booked weeks or months in advance. Others limit appointments due to the physical toll of repetitive braiding motions.
According to Ogunbiyi, the issue extends beyond scheduling. “We’ve heard from stylists that their biggest barriers to scale are time and endurance.” Those limitations have direct implications for revenue growth. Unlike many beauty professionals, braiders often face a hard cap on earnings because their income remains tied to hours worked.
Halo believes reducing appointment times can fundamentally change that equation. “HaloBraid gives stylists and clients hours back in their day, which, to us, is the ultimate luxury,” said Ogunbiyi. “This luxury is then lucrative for braiders and salons.”
The company also argued that shorter appointments could allow salons to increase throughput, serve more clients, and reduce physical wear on stylists. “A salon that can offer small knotless braids in two2 hours would have a line around the block, and stylists could meet the demand more easily.”
Consumer demand appears to support that assumption. Halo surveyed 2,000 braid wearers and found that 95% would get their hair braided more frequently if the process were faster. That finding suggests that appointment length may be one of the category’s largest barriers to growth. ‘There’s untapped demand for braiding, and the limit is time,” said Ogunbiyi.
Despite the size of the braiding market, convincing investors to understand the opportunity required education. Many institutional investors have little direct experience with braiding services, making it difficult to immediately grasp the scale of the problem. “Even though our market is huge, most institutional investors do not know that because most of them don’t get their hair braided,” Ogunbiyi said.
The company found success by reframing the challenge in economic terms. “If you frame the problem in ways they understand, like ‘sewing by hand’ or ‘a $300 six6-hour haircut,’ or mention the carpal tunnel and arthritis that afflicts braiding stylists, they quickly get the scale of the problem,” she said.
The approach resonated. Prior to closing its seed round, Halo secured $250,000 in non-dilutive funding and won a $1 million investment through a pitch competition. In 2025, Ogunbiyi, who is a Harvard Business School and Harvard Engineering School alumna (MS/MBA), and Halo gained national attention after winning Harvard University’s prestigious President's Innovation Challenge, one of the institution's highest honors for student and alumni founders, helping validate investor interest in the company's vision for modernizing the braiding industry.
According to Ogunbiyi, the company ultimately closed an oversubscribed round earlier than expected. Investors were also attracted to the team's technical credentials. Ogunbiyi previously cofounded a hardware startup, while the broader Halo team has collectively brought more than 100 hardware products to market.
For now, the focus remains on commercial deployment. HaloBraid is expected to launch in salons this fall, with ambitions to expand across independent braiders, home salons, traditional braiding salons, and major salon chains.
However, the longer-term vision extends beyond braiding. “We plan to eventually expand globally to meet the demand of everyone who wears braids, and everyone who has hair with texture,” said Ogunbiyi. “Long term, we plan to create innovative products for all hair with texture,” she concluded.
The ambition is proof of the laudable shift occurring across the beauty industry. As investors search for underserved categories with strong consumer demand, innovation in textured hair is increasingly moving from a niche opportunity to a serious business proposition. Halo is betting that braiding will be one of the first categories to prove just how large that opportunity can become.