Yinka Ogunbiyi, MS/MBA '23, stood on the stage at Klarman Hall in 2023, recognized with an Ingenuity Award for early-stage start-ups at the President’s Innovation Challenge. She returned to the Harvard Business School (HBS) stage two years later and claimed a much larger prize, her start-up Halo Braid claiming $75,000 as winner of the Alumni & Affiliates Open track of the competition, organized by the Harvard Innovation Labs. Coupled with three Ingenuity Awards, start-ups co-founded by students and alumni affiliated with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) took in over $83,000 in Bertarelli Foundation prize money.

“At a time when so much is uncertain, the possibility of redefining what’s possible is not only a springboard to your own achievements, but also a gift to our community, our nation and our world,” said Alan M. Garber, President of Harvard University. “Your willingness to pursue ideas, to take risks, and to carve new paths to excellence, reminds us all of the power of knowledge, and the importance and necessity of places like Harvard.”

Halo Braid is an automated hair-braiding device that greatly speeds up the time it takes, using machine learning to ensure a professional-level result. By decreasing the time needed to braid hair, stylists can significantly increase the number of clients they see in a day, while also reducing the physical fatigue and potential chronic pain conditions associated with the profession.

“Finding salons and stylists hasn’t been a problem, because this is so meaningful to them, and the idea of braiding in half the time, let alone minutes, is groundbreaking,” said Ogunbiyi, who co-founded the company with David Afolabi, MBA '23. “However, designing a device that works has been really tough. In the past 18 months, we’ve built 450 prototype iterations. The tricky thing is creating a braid, doing it on a human’s head, and doing it with hair, which is one of the hardest things to work with.”

Halo Braid was one of six 2025 finalists co-founded by SEAS students, alumni and faculty. Ogunbiyi, a graduate of the MS/MBA program run jointly by SEAS and HBS, plans to use the grand prize to help open a hair salon in Boston to scale up testing different braiding styles before launching manufacturing later this year.

“I don’t think Halo Braid would exist if we hadn’t been at HBS and SEAS,” Ogunbiyi said. “In terms of what we learned, who we met and ideas we were exposed to has shaped every decision that we’ve made at Halo Braid. It’s helped us avoid certain mistakes, or make mistakes and react to them more quickly.”

Afolabi added, “The dynamism of being at HBS definitely allows people to react to situations that are evolving very quickly. We’ve seen a lot of changes in technology and beyond in the last few years. Being able to react to that and stay ahead of the curve has been very useful for us.”

Three SEAS-affiliated teams were recognized with Ingenuity Awards. AIRQUA, co-founded by Master in Design Engineering students Sirinda Limsong, Hongbee Park and Eric Oh, derives clean, drinkable water from the air, providing a sustainable solution for areas affected by drought or water depletion. Pythia Diagnostics, co-founded by biomedical engineering concentrators Derek Vastola, A.B. '24, and Lani Tran, A.B. '26, as well as computer science concentrator Charlie Bratton, A.B. '26, is building a wearable device that predicts epileptic seizures by analyzing chemicals released by the skill. 

SpiroSniff is a breathalyzer for early lung cancer detection. Designed as a senior capstone group project by Roaa Marei, Alex Klein Wassink and Gabby Troy, the device recently won a Dean’s Award for Outstanding Engineering Projects.

“At SpiroSniff, we found that lung cancer is costly to diagnose, and it is often diagnosed way too late,” Marei said. “What if we could create a breathalyzer that detects lung cancer easier and cheaper to save more lives? That’s exactly what SpiroSniff did.”

Halo continues the long-running success of SEAS-affiliated start-ups in the President’s Innovation Challenge. EndoShunt, MesaQuantum and Beaver Health all won grand prizes in 2024, and Penguin.ai won in 2023, with Stochastic winning the $25,000 runner-up prize in the same track that year.