New Hair-Braiding Robot Could Cut Appointment Times in Half

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Getting braids done can be a long process, with appointments sometimes lasting for hours. Nigerian American engineer Yinka Ogunbiyi is hoping to make that experience a little easier with HaloBraid, a hair-braiding robot designed to work alongside professional stylists.

Rather than replacing the person doing your hair, HaloBraid takes over one of the most repetitive parts of the process. A stylist still parts the hair, chooses the size and pattern, adds extensions, and begins each braid by hand. The braid is then placed into the device, which continues weaving it down the remaining length. According to HaloBraid, the technology can finish individual braids up to five times faster and potentially cut an appointment roughly in half.

The idea came to Ogunbiyi during the COVID-19 lockdown, when she spent four days braiding her own hair. With a background in biomechanical engineering, she began thinking about whether technology could make the process faster without taking the stylist out of it completely. That became the basis for HaloBraid. Instead of trying to automate the entire hairstyle, the device focuses on the repetitive weaving that comes after a stylist has already done the more creative and precise work of sectioning, styling, and starting each braid.

Speed is only part of the goal. Braiders can spend hours repeating the same hand movements during a single appointment, which can put strain on their hands, wrists, and bodies. By taking over some of that repetitive work, HaloBraid is designed to make the process easier on stylists while also allowing them to serve more clients. As Ogunbiyi says, she hopes to “save 8 billion hours for Black women each year.”

Developing a machine that could actually handle hair was its own challenge. Unlike rigid materials, strands of hair bend, tangle, and move unpredictably, making them difficult for a machine to manipulate. Ogunbiyi and her team spent years testing different versions of the technology before arriving at the current design.

That persistence paid off in 2025, when HaloBraid won the $75,000 grand prize in the Alumni & Affiliates Open Track of Harvard’s President’s Innovation Challenge. Ogunbiyi, who earned a joint MS/MBA from Harvard in 2023, had previously received an Ingenuity Award for the early-stage company two years earlier.

The company has since raised $7 million in funding to help bring HaloBraid to market. The goal is to introduce the device into professional salon settings, where stylists can use it as another tool rather than as a replacement for their skills, since braiding requires skill and creativity.

For anyone used to spending much of a day getting braids done, cutting even a few hours from an appointment could make a big difference. And for stylists, HaloBraid offers a way for technology to handle some of the most repetitive work while leaving the creativity and control in human hands.