Black Harvard alumni invent hair-braiding robot that could transform salons forever

Halo Braid, winner of the 2025 President’s Innovation Challenge Award at the Harvard Innovation Lab, has devised a hair-braiding robot.

While braids are a popular, universal protective style that has myriad merits and dates back across cultures for thousands of years, getting them is a costly and lengthy process that still takes hours — even days in some cases — to complete. That could all change with the help of robots.

Halo Braid, a company that has produced a hair braiding robot, won the 2025 President’s Innovation Challenge Award earlier this year at the Harvard Innovation Lab, Harvard’s startup incubator that supports student and alumni ventures through funding, mentorship, and resources, and has plans to open a salon before the year’s end. 

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The company, founded by Harvard alumni Yinka Ogunbiyi and David Afolabi, took home the $75,000 grand prize in the Alumni & Affiliates Open Track category.

“Imagine if every time you got your hair cut, it took six hours, cost two to $300 and gave your hair stylist arthritis at age 29,” Ogunbiyi said during the startup competition. “This is what it’s like to get your hair braided.”

An avid braid devotee herself, she added that she knows this from personal experience.

“I know this firsthand because I’ve worn braids all my life, and when I braided my own hair for the first time, it took me four days,” she said. “But I’m not alone, because hair braiding is now the most popular hairstyle for 20 million Americans who experience this miserable process every eight weeks. And yet, braiding hasn’t seen innovation since braiding was invented 5,000 years ago.”

Halo Braid, a patent-pending innovation, is the first robot ever devised to finish braids after a stylist starts them, reducing the time it takes from hours to minutes. The device, which resembles a cream and gold standing dryer, utilizes machine learning to achieve professional-quality results at five times the speed, enabling stylists to expand their businesses without compromising their hands.

Ogunbyi said the robot will, “make braiding joyful, not painful.” 

The device has already been put to use, successfully completing thousands of braids, including Ogunbiyi’s own hair. Over the last 18 months, the team has built more than 450 prototypes as they refined the robot to braid real human hair.

With the $75,000 prize, Halo Braid is gearing up to open a salon in Boston to pilot and scale the technology ahead of wider manufacturing later this year. In the meantime, the company has opened a waitlist for stylists and salons interested in adding the robot to their arsenal once it becomes commercially available.

“We’re excited to realize our mission of saving billions of hours spent braiding hair each year,” Ogunbyi added. “And transform an industry that hasn’t changed in thousands of years.”