Tech
HaloBraid raises $7M from Seven Seven Six to end the six-hour hair salon appointment
Box. Boho. Knotlesss. Most Black women understand exactly what those words refer to: braided hairstyles. The thousand-year-old ritual is practically a rite of passage, and many Black women and girls even today sit in salon chairs, up to 12 hours at a stretch, as a stylist weaves patterns into their hair.
But that’s also the problem. For thousands of years, hair braiding has been a manual task. Until recently, that is. Speaking to TechCrunch, Yinka Ogunbiyi recalled when she was stuck alone in her London apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic and tried braiding her own hair: “It took me four days,” she said.
Ogunbiyi, who has an MS in engineering from Harvard as well as an MBA, had previously founded a smart cooking appliance company, and started looking at braiding as a technical problem to be solved.
After years of research, on Tuesday, she launched a robotics startup: HaloBraid aims to help salons speed up braiding with its first device, slated to launch later this year, that acts as a braiding assistant for professional stylists. The company has raised $7 million in a seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, Seven Seven Six.
Ogunbiyi didn’t go into much detail about the device, as she said there are still patents pending, but she did explain how it works: A stylist starts the braiding and then hands off the process to HaloBraid, which can finish the rest of the braid in seconds. She noted that the product is meant to be gentle on the hair, and that it can help finish both knotless and box braids.
In her research, Ogunbiyi found that people spend an estimated 8 billion hours braiding hair each year. She said in her survey of 2,000 people, 95% said they would get their hair braided more often if it took less time. Stylists, meanwhile, have to work long hours and can face health issues like carpal tunnel or arthritis.
To Ohanian, it was clear that there’s a sizable market and potential for returns for a device that can make braiding easier.
Ohanian is married to Serena Williams, a Black woman famous for some of her braided hairstyles on the tennis court. He also has two Black children who sport braided styles. “I’ve studied exactly how long these braiding sessions take,” he told TechCrunch, and added: “My oldest daughter loves the ritual for the first few hours, but by hour nine, everyone’s ready to call it a night.”
He noted how Dyson has helped transform tooling for hair styles (like with their famous hair dryer) while tech for textured hair remains unexplored “despite a loyal audience that’s eager to spend.”
“This is hardware’s moment,” he continued, citing other investments he’s made, like the rocket company Stoke and the asteroid mining company AstroForge. “An automated braider feels eminently buildable. This product is genuinely differentiated, with a clear go-to-market.”
Other investors in the seed round include AlleyCorp and Bling Capital. The startup will use the fresh funding for product development, manufacturing, and securing salon partnerships.
HaloBraid doesn’t have many competitors in the hair-braiding device market, with the most notable being Braidiant. Ogunbiyi said one reason it has been so hard to innovate in this space is that hair itself is quite difficult to deal with, especially when it comes to a process as intricate as braiding. In fact, she said hair is one of the “trickiest substrates in the world to manipulate,” and that she had to borrow methods from different industries, from material science to inkjet printing, to make this device.
Armed with fresh cash and validation, now the startup has to make it through launch day. But Ogunbiyi said she and her team of around 15 are already thinking about other devices to create, like one that can undo braids (a process that can often take just as long as the braiding itself).
“HaloBraid is our first product, but our larger vision is to create breakthrough technology that makes textured haircare faster, easier, more comfortable, and more joyful,” she said.
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Tech
OpenAI launches new initiative to help find and patch open source bugs
OpenAI announced a new initiative on Monday designed to help the open source community improve its cybersecurity game and ward off bugs.
“Patch the Planet” (which is a not-so-subtle allusion to “Hack the Planet,” the iconic catchphrase from the 1995 movie “Hackers”) will see OpenAI team up with the security company Trail of Bits to help open source maintainers secure their projects.
OpenAI said security staff from Trail of Bits will work directly with open source maintainers to review potential code issues. OpenAI’s security tools — like Codex Security — will be used to assist in the process.
“Many maintainers are already being asked to sort through more reports, more quickly, with the same limited time and resources,” OpenAI said Monday. “Patch the Planet is built to reduce that burden, not add to it: security engineers review findings before they reach maintainers, work with projects to develop patches and tests, and build reusable workflows that help teams continue improving security after the first fixes land.”
In other words, Trail of Bits engineers will function more or less like code EMTs — there to help open source project maintainers identify and triage potential issues, all supported by OpenAI’s software. It sounds like an ambitious project, and it’s somewhat unclear how it will function in the long term, or how it plans to scale up (if at all).
Open source projects are the digital bedrock upon which the commercial software industry rests, but, unfortunately, due to the decentralized and poorly monitored structure of that ecosystem, much of the software is insecure. Bugs in open source projects can turn into major problems for commercial codebases. The log4j debacle from several years ago — when a bad vulnerability was discovered in a widely used open source utility — is a good example.
Much of the concern surrounding tools like Mythos (Anthropic’s highly publicized security tool) seems to stem from the fact that AI can now automatically identify existing bugs within codebases and set about creating exploits for them. While the automation of cybercrime is not new, these tools undoubtedly have the potential to make it significantly more convenient for bad actors.
OpenAI is turning that formula on its head by using AI to help the open source community better protect itself. It’s hard not to read it as a competitive swipe at Anthropic, while also recognizing that it’s something the open source community desperately needs.
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Tech
Fika Jobs raises $4M to build a video-first hiring platform where AI agents interview candidates
The hiring process has long been criticized for its inefficiency and opacity. Candidates spend hours writing applications and submitting cover letters, only to disappear into what often feels like a black box. Generative AI has only made things messier, with employers increasingly relying on AI-powered screening systems to sift through an overwhelming number of submissions.
Stockholm-based startup Fika Jobs thinks there’s a better way. The company is building a video-first hiring platform that combines AI interview agents with short-form video profiles, creating something that feels like a cross between LinkedIn and TikTok. Instead of relying solely on resumes, candidates complete AI-powered interviews designed to showcase their personality and communication skills.
Fika Jobs announced on Tuesday a $4 million pre-seed round, which will be used to continue developing the platform, grow the team, and prepare for a wider launch later this year.
For job seekers, the process starts by connecting a LinkedIn profile. Fika’s AI reviews the candidate’s background and generates personalized interview questions. Candidates then complete a roughly 10-minute video interview with the AI agent, currently powered by Google’s Gemini models.
After the interview, Fika automatically turns responses into short video clips and organizes them into a profile. Instead of applying to every new role, candidates maintain a live profile that employers can discover and revisit as new opportunities arise.
The idea came from co-founders and brothers Jakob Dubois (CEO) and Alexander Dubois (CTO) while they were building their previous startup.
“When we were building [social app] Gaff, we spent a lot of time recruiting and almost passed on a candidate because his resume did not really stand out,” Jakob Dubois told TechCrunch. “We ended up speaking with him anyway, and within minutes, his grit, drive, and ambition became obvious. Exactly the kind of person we wanted to hire.”
That experience convinced the founders that some traits that employers care about most are difficult to capture on paper.
Unlike most competitors (Alex, Maki, and Mercor, among others) that focus on helping employers source, screen, and match candidates more efficiently with AI, Fika is building a platform where candidates maintain video-first profiles and employers browse a pool of people who have already been interviewed and evaluated by AI.
If successful, Fika Jobs could help employers assess communication skills and cultural fit early in the hiring process, complementing traditional resume and application reviews. This approach may be especially valuable for early-career professionals and candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, whose potential is not always apparent from a resume alone.
Of course, video profiles introduce real bias risks that are also worth acknowledging. When employers can see a candidate’s race, age, gender, physical appearance, and accent before evaluating their qualifications, it opens the door to discrimination that a resume, for all its flaws, at least partially obscures. There’s a reason some companies have moved toward blind resume screening.
The platform plans to open early access to candidates this week, with a broader public launch expected this fall. The company will initially focus on Sweden before expanding internationally. Fika currently has a small team but expects to reach around 10 employees by the end of the year.
More than 100 companies are on the waitlist, say the founders, though they declined to disclose which ones. Separately, they said more than 50 companies have tested the platform, including Plenty Labs, SICS.ai, Kognity, and Rebtel.
The platform is free for job seekers. Employers pay nothing up front, but Fika takes 10% of a candidate’s first-year salary upon a successful hire. (The company notes that this is lower than the 20% to 30% placement fees often charged by traditional recruiters and headhunters.)
The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo best known for creating the hit mobile game Candy Crush.
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Tech
Ribbie turns real-time baseball stats into arcade-like, pixel-art broadcasts
Whether you’re a baseball fan or not, there’s a lot to love about Ribbie, a vibe-coded website that turns real-time Major League Baseball (MLB) data into 8-bit broadcasts with arcade-style, animated pixel art.
“I love how much data is available to baseball fans […] but when I try to follow a game with ESPN Gamecast, I find it kind of boring,” Ribbie creator Eric Brownrout told TechCrunch.
Still, the idea for Ribbie didn’t materialize until Brownrout generated a pixel-art image of Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber to use as his fantasy baseball team’s logo.
“I love the aesthetic, and started thinking about ways I might be able to apply it to a data or visualization tool,” Brownrout said. “A quick Google search revealed the MLB public StatsAPI, and I realized I could theoretically recreate an entire baseball game in the same pixel format.”
Like many other tech workers in San Francisco, Brownrout has now spent many nights experimenting with Claude Code. He stands out, though, because his tinkering yielded something that’s delightful.
“I used Claude Code and Codex extensively to turn a project that would have easily taken months into something I could build and launch in a few weekends,” he said. “I used Codex to build the image- and sprite-generation workflow, and Claude Code helped with the web app development. I’ve never built a video game before, so this was a new one for me.”
Visiting Ribbie — an onomatopoeia of the baseball stat RBI (runs batted in) — transports you to a pixel-art living room that shows which MLB games are being played, and you can select one to “watch” with Ribbie. (You can choose to zoom in on the screen and cut out the living room graphics, if you want something more practical.)
On mainstream play-by-play apps like ESPN’s Gamecast and MLB’s own Gameday, the interface is pretty basic, clearly displaying information without frills.
Ribbie prioritizes aesthetics instead, with unique pixel-art representations of every stadium and player. But it’s still simple enough to see the score of the game, as well as who’s pitching, hitting, or on base.
Because the data for all of these visualizations comes from the MLB’s API, you can find most of the information you’d be used to seeing on other apps, but it makes for a more descriptive play-by-play. Brownrout recently added support for fantasy baseball, which allows people to add their rosters and track which players are currently active in their respective games.
“I just really love the aesthetic of the miniature pixel-art stadiums,” Brownrout said. “There’s something so satisfying about it that’s hard to put a finger on. I think it’s one of the reasons people are obsessed with games like Stardew Valley. It’s an entire pixel world in the palm of your hand.”
Passion projects like Ribbie feel refreshing because they’re not trying to extract anything from us, something rare at a time when we’re so inured to being tracked everywhere online. But can projects like Ribbie last? Is it inevitable that the MLB’s lawyers will come after Ribbie because the mammoth sports organization feels threatened by a pixelized sprite of Shohei Ohtani?
These are real risks, but Brownrout thinks he’s got his bases covered (pun intended). He referenced a legal case from 2007 in which the court ruled that baseball stats are facts, and therefore are not copyrightable. This allows fantasy baseball products to exist without the MLB’s permission.
“The API is the same one that powers fantasy baseball websites, third-party stats sites, live game threads on Reddit […] So it’s historically been used for all types of official and fan-created projects,” he said. “Ultimately, the project is completely free and non-commercial, and I try to make it very clear on the website that Ribbie is an unaffiliated fan project. It’s a ‘love letter’ to baseball, not something trying to compete with MLB.tv.”
Though Brownout is pretty busy as the co-founder of AI SaaS platform Frigade, he’s still finding time to build Ribbie for the love of the game.
“I’m adding sound effects and fuller animations to make it a little easier to passively follow along with while it’s on in the background,” he said. “My neighbors must think I’m crazy, because last night I was in my bedroom doing 100 takes of ‘Ball! Strike! Out!’ on my iPhone to record for the Ribbie audio track.”
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OpenAI launches new initiative to help find and patch open source bugs
