In 2020 Yinka Ogunbiyi was alone in her London apartment during the pandemic lockdown with no braider to call. So she did her own box braids for the first time. It took her four days.

Somewhere in the middle of day two the engineer in her started asking questions. Why was there no machine to speed this up? She told Allure that the motion reminded her of sewing, a repetitive task that people automated long ago. That frustration became the seed of HaloBraid.

This week the idea finally stepped into the light. On Wednesday her company posted the first public demonstration of the device on its Instagram account under a simple caption: Meet HaloBraid. The clip shows a stylist starting a braid by hand before the machine takes over and weaves the rest of it down the length of the hair.

A helper for stylists

Ogunbiyi has been clear from the start that HaloBraid is not built to replace braiders. The stylist still parts the hair, adds the extensions and starts every braid. Then the strand goes into a unit mounted on the salon chair, which completes the plain three-strand section. The company says it can finish each braid up to five times faster than doing it by hand.

It is designed for individual styles like box braids and knotless braids in sizes from micro to extra large. It cannot do cornrows or anything braided flat against the scalp. In one example Ogunbiyi gave Allure, a box braid style that usually takes six to eight hours could come in closer to three.

Speed is only part of the pitch. Stylists the team consulted told her about carpal tunnel and arthritis in their hands. The team says it brought pros in again and again during development. One early handheld design was scrapped after stylists said holding it got in their way.

From a Harvard prize to $7 million

Ogunbiyi is a biomechanical engineer who earned her degrees at Harvard, including an engineering master's and an MBA. Before Halo she co-founded the smart kitchen company Desora. She built Halo with co-founder David Afolabi and the pair won Harvard's 2025 President's Innovation Challenge along with $75,000. A clip of her pitch from that event went viral online.

In June the startup announced a $7 million seed round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. AlleyCorp and Bling Capital also invested. Ohanian, whose wife Serena Williams is famous for her braids, told TechCrunch his oldest daughter enjoys the first hours of a braiding session but by hour nine the whole house is ready for bed.

Interest from salons appears to be strong. In July the U.S. Mission in Nigeria praised Ogunbiyi on X and said more than 7,000 salons were on the HaloBraid waiting list. The company has also named celebrity hairstylist Vernon François as its first creative engineer.

What comes next

HaloBraid will not be sold for home use. Instead salons in its Founding Stylist Program get access through a phased rollout and pay a fee for each appointment where the device is used rather than buying it outright. The company says a stylist can learn the basics in about 10 minutes.

The demo drew thousands of reactions. Many braiders cheered the idea of saving their hands while others worried that machines could chip away at an art passed down for generations. Ogunbiyi has said she wants to save Black women eight billion hours a year. Her team is already thinking about a second device that could take braids out, a job that can take nearly as long as putting them in.