Nigerian-American founder Yinka Ogunbiyi has become the top trending name across social media platforms after attaining a recent milestone.
Ogunbiyi, also a Harvard-trained engineer, is currently making waves after becoming the first Nigerian engineer to build a robotic device (HaloBraid) that can help professional hairstylists complete individual braids up to five times faster.
In a demonstrative video shared in late October, HaloBraid showcased how technology combines manual hairstyling with automated braiding to cut the time spent on one of the most repetitive parts of creating protective hairstyles.
Unlike a fully autonomous salon robot, HaloBraid is designed to provide support to professional hairstylists rather than replace them.
How did Ogunbiyi Come Up With the Idea?
Ogunbiyi’s idea for HaloBraid emerged during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when she attempted to braid her own hair and spent four days completing the process.
As a biomechanical engineer, Ogunbiyi wondered why there was not already a device that could make the repetitive part of braiding faster, and saw an opportunity to apply ”engineering to a task that requires considerable time.”
That question eventually led to HaloBraid, and she later co-founded Halo with David Afolabi to develop a device to help professional braiders.
In June 2026, the company raised $7 million in seed funding, led by Seven Seven Six, the venture capital firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
Speaking about her inspiration, Ogunbiyi said it came from her childhood experience of getting her hair braided and the challenges she repeatedly observed among both stylists and clients.
“My braid story starts at age four, sitting between my mum’s legs as she braided my hair for the first time. Since then, I’ve spent thousands of hours getting my hair braided — and heard the same story from stylists and clients again and again: braiding is beautiful, but it takes too much time and too much strain,” she said.
Who is Yinka Ogunbiyi?
Yinka Ogunbiyi is an MS/MBA Alumni from Harvard Business School and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
She grew up in Purley, a London suburb, in a family of Nigerian engineers who later became butchers and chefs.
For her undergraduate studies, Ogunbiyi moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lived in Kirkland House, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering sciences (bioengineering) with honours, graduating in 2016.
After graduation, she spent about four years building a smart cooking appliance startup, helping bring roughly six connected BBQ smokers and indoor grill products to market. She then worked for a year as a chef and recipe developer in London, then returned to Harvard for the joint MS/MBA program.
Since graduating from HBS, she founded HaloBraid, a hair-technology company building the first intelligent hair-braiding tool.
Beyond her passion for the intersection of novel technologies and culture, Ogunbiyi is also a chef; she has spoken about traditional and experimental cooking methods (including earth-oven/pit styles from her background and related techniques).
On Instagram (@foodfireandsoul), she has about 63–65k followers, where she shares cuisine and recipes. Outside of cooking and technology work, she enjoys throwing dinner parties, listening to jazz, and watching British reality TV.