For most of its history, textured hair care sat entirely outside the venture capital conversation. It was treated as a service category, not a technology one, and was therefore undercapitalized, poorly researched, and rarely pitched as a hardware or biotech opportunity. That’s changing fast. While AI companies like BrainTrust champion a new wave of investment for founders creating products for textured hair, other founders have turned braiding and extensions into venture-backed engineering problems.
Four textured hair tech companies, HaloBraid, Ruka Hair, Myavana, and Rebundle, have collectively raised more than $32 million in disclosed venture and grant funding, backed by investors spanning deep-tech venture firms, a German consumer-goods conglomerate, Amazon, and a retailer’s own strategic fund.
The broader case is straightforward on paper. The global hair and scalp care market was valued at $88.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $150.5 billion by 2033, a 7% compound annual growth rate. Roughly 65% of the world’s population has textured hair, and on average, women with textured hair spend 78% more on hair products than women with straight hair.
Robotics company HaloBraid closed a $7 million seed round led by Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six, with AlleyCorp and Bling Capital participating, on top of $250,000 in non-dilutive funding and $1 million from AlleyCorp’s own inaugural Peerless Pitch competition. HaloBraid’s founder Yinka Ogunbiyi told BeautyMatter the round closed “much earlier than we expected.”
Ruka Hair, a biotech material company for textured hair that produces textured extensions, wigs, and braid hair out of engineered protein fiber, has raised $10 million to date, most recently a $4.5 million round co-led by Henkel Ventures and Freedom Trail Capital. Ruka founder Tendai Moyo said her next round will target roughly $12 million, adding candidly that Ruka remains under-capitalized relative to non-Black-founded peers.
AI company Myavana has raised roughly $10.8 million since its 2012 launch, including an earlier $4.9 million from pitch competitions and angel investors, followed by a $5.9 million seed round backed by Prisma Ventures (Ulta Beauty’s own innovation fund), H/L Ventures, BrainTrust, and Duo Partners. Founder Candace Mitchell confirmed to BeautyMatter that she’s now “preparing for our series” with retail-strategic interest already in hand. Rebundle has raised around $3 million combined across pre-seed equity and grants, including a $1.4 million pre-seed round led by M25.
Rebundle’s founder Ciara Imani May was candid with BeautyMatter. The founder of the plant-fiber hair company resisted institutional capital for years before deciding that dilutive capital could take her company a lot further. This hesitation, which May, Moyo, and Mitchell each raised, is rooted in skepticism that outside investment may mean losing control of formulation, pricing, or mission.
Each company targets a slice of the market investors have historically mispriced by measuring its pieces separately. Ogunbiyi laid out the fragmentation problem directly. “The salon services market is $270 billion, textured hair is around $30 billion, hair styling tools are $15 billion, and then extensions and products are carved out separately again,” she told BeautyMatter, noting “the market information is disparate or in some cases doesn’t exist,” which forced HaloBraid to run its own research, including surveying thousands of people.
May made the identical argument, specifically about extensions. “There’s more than enough data points online to demonstrate the size of the hair extensions market, and there was a huge opportunity,” she said, drawing attention to untapped consumers like small beauty supply stores and moms. Mitchell described convincing Myavana’s data-focused investor, Duo Partners, using the same logic. “It’s really about showing them how it’s an untapped market, meaning that the data potential of understanding this market is exponential and is untapped.”
The category data backs all three of these accounts. According to World Metrics, AI beauty (Myavana’s segment) is projected to reach $15.8 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 41.3% from 2023 to 2030. Its adoption is expected to reach 75% by 2027, up from 28% in 2023, driven by increasing consumer demand for personalization. Zoom out further, and the metrics of beauty have simply gotten too large to keep ignoring.
What links funding rounds for these four brands is who’s writing the checks: mostly investors without existing beauty portfolios, evaluating technical and data theses rather than having category familiarity. AlleyCorp’s Brannon Jones—a mechanical and aerospace engineer by training, formerly at SpaceX—said the HaloBraid investment was “very much on thesis for us.” In pure robotics terms, “it’s a hard, pure, technical challenge to manipulate the hair strands and the hair fibers.”
What convinced AlleyCorp was execution speed. “[Ogunbiyi] did 600 different, real prototypes,” Jones continued. Henkel Ventures’ Tobias Botenwerfer, backing Ruka, credited the founders with “disciplined execution in building the business under challenging market conditions,” while Freedom Trail Capital’s Samyr Laine called their work “pioneering biotech innovation that could reshape an entire category.” Ulta Beauty’s Agustina Sartori, backing Myavana through Prisma Ventures, called the technology “such a differentiated and powerful use of AI in an enormous market with few competitors.”
Each founder described building proof points a category-agnostic investor would demand, but a beauty-only investor might not have asked for. May said Rebundle leaned on clinical validation that wasn’t previously standard in hair, citing microbiome, heavy-metal, and shelf-life testing. Moyo described a similar push at Ruka. “We actually filed a patent, and we have trademarks,” she said, because neither type of investor fully understood the company alone. “Tech angel has historically underpriced distribution and trust, whereas culture-first investors historically underpriced the technical risk, the defensibility questions.”
That pattern tracks where venture dollars are actually flowing. Per Crunchbase News, roughly 50% of all global venture funding in 2025 went to tech and AI-related fields, with AI funding reaching $211 billion, up 85% year over year. Companies with real technical IP (patents, proprietary fiber science, AI models) can capture some of that reallocated capital in a way CPG-style beauty brands structurally cannot.
None of the founders described this funding as identity-neutral. Jones was explicit that AlleyCorp first met Ogunbiyi through a pitch competition for underrepresented founders, and cited research showing that underrepresented founders innovate at higher rates, despite receiving less credit and fewer follow-on accolades. “If part of the unlock is providing capital, access, and network, wouldn’t it make sense to go try to support some of these founders?” he asked. Moyo’s account of being “under-raised,” May’s early resistance to “dilutive capital,” and Mitchell’s insistence on protecting Myavana from being “driven by venture capital” all track precisely with the industry-wide data.
Black founders overall received just 0.32% of total US venture funding in 2025, and the 200 Black women founders newly indexed as the first to reach $1 million in VC funding have collectively raised $4 billion, a milestone only now being tracked systematically. Black women have historically received less than 0.35% of all VC funding, and funding to Black-founded startups plummeted 45% in 2022 after the post-2020 surge faded.
What’s different now is that founders across four distinct technical disciplines—robotics, biomaterials, AI, and plant-fiber science—have each independently converted investor skepticism into real capital, backed by market sizing one investor summed up simply about HaloBraid. “If anyone’s going to figure it out, it’s them.” Whether that capital scales to match the opportunity described by both the data and the founders is the open question for the next fundraising cycle.