🤖 Braid bot

Plus: Not so baby shark, the best mac & cheese, and more.

Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋   Good morning. Even though we might not have ever met you, we really hope you have a wonderful day. But maybe that's a little weird? It's a common enough experience that "parasocial" — a word to describe a connection with someone you don't know — was named Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 word of the year. A lexicographer at the dictionary said the word "captures the 2025 zeitgeist" with people forming emotional bonds with everyone from Taylor Swift to ChatGPT. Anyway, love ya. STARTING UP The company putting monarchs on the map    ❌  The problem: Monarch butterfly migrations stretch thousands of miles across North America, and, until now, scientists knew little about their life cycles — something that's become more pressing as flying insect populations fall.    💡  The pitch: Cellular Tracking Technologies — a company with just 36 employees — built a tiny, solar-powered radio tag that weighs 60 milligrams and costs $200. The tag lets users track individual monarchs via an app, with real-time updates on their routes.    🚀  The outlook: More than 400 butterflies have been tagged this year as they make their flight to Mexico for the winter (jealous), and the company hopes that amateur butterfly enthusiasts might be willing to pay for tags in addition to professional biologists. If you're fascinated but not ready to start manhandling monarchs, you can follow their flight through the Project Monarch Science app.   NEWS FLASH   A good influence: Focus Friend, a productivity app with 1m+ Android installs, won Google Play's app of the year. Developed by YouTuber Hank Green, it blocks any other apps you find distracting and provides a cartoon friend who looks like a bean and enjoys knitting. The creator economy keeps booming: Agentio, a startup that matches brands and YouTube creators, raised $40m to expand its AI-powered platform. The startup told TechCrunch that it's paid tens of millions to creators since its 2023 launch, and has begun beta testing Meta platforms.  Ear we go: Lumia 2, a $250 smart earring that Lumia claims is the world's tiniest wearable, launches next year. It's designed to track health and fitness stats, including blood flow to the brain.   No more game of telephone: Bay Area healthcare startup No Barrier raised $2.7m to provide HIPAA-compliant speech interpretations in 40+ languages. The company says its services reduce interpretation costs by up to 70% because people no longer have to wait for third-party translators.  FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM This AI tool could prevent failed organ transplants    Yes, you read that right.    Thousands of people need life-saving organ transplants, but the timing is incredibly delicate: A liver must be transplanted within 45 minutes of a donor's death.    Now, there's an AI tool that could cut wasted organ recovery attempts by 60%. 👉  Read more on Mindstream   THE BIG IDEA Two Harvard alums built a robot that can braid hair A robot that can reduce the time it takes to braid hair from hours to minutes won the 2025 Presidents Innovation Challenge, Harvard Innovation Labs' startup competition for students and alumni. Yinka Ogunbiyi and David Afolabi, two Nigerian Harvard alums, invented Halo Braid to save time and money for both braiders and clients, per Black Enterprise. One salon estimates the average time required for box braids is four to 12 hours, depending on the stylist's skill and the type and size of the braid. Ogunbiyi said that getting her hair braided, something she's done all her life, takes six hours and costs $200-$300.  And while Ogunbiyi noted that braids are a popular hairstyle that many have redone every eight weeks, the practice "hasn't seen innovation since braiding was invented" thousands of years ago. Ogunbiyi and Afolabi built 450 prototypes over 18 months, completing thousands of braids, including with Ogunbiyi's own hair.    "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," she said. How it works Braiders start each braid, but Halo Braid — which looks nothing like a humanoid bot but more like stand dryers already seen in some salons — finishes it. This results in a process that Halo says is 5x faster, not to mention much easier on braiders' hands. A study of African hair braiders in Oklahoma City and Dallas-Fort Worth found that hair braiders may experience work-related musculoskeletal disorders due to the repetitive hand motions they perform. What's next? Halo Braid won a $75k prize in the competition, which it will use to open a Boston salon where it'll pilot the machine and various hairstyles before scaling manufacturing. There is currently a waitlist for braiders and salons interested in the machine when it launches. Though not everyone may use it: While some responses on social media were overjoyed at the potential time savings, others balked at letting a bot get involved in a cultural and communal activity passed between generations. 🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Taking advice from a doughnut shop? Say less. The founder and co-owner of Brewnuts shared her expertise in our Masters in Marketing newsletter so you can turn dollars to doughnuts (or the other way around, hopefully).  NEWSWORTHY NUMBER How much more money "Baby Shark Dance," the viral children's song, could have made without YouTube's monetization limits on Made for Kids content, based on an estimate by Boston University marketing professor Garrett Johnson, per The Wall Street Journal.  Since 2016, the song has amassed 16.4B views — nearly as many as Taylor Swift's top 10 YouTube videos have received collectively — making it the platform's most-watched video ever and making Pinkfong, the South Korean company behind it, a fortune, even in spite of its stifled potential. It generated $67m in revenue last year and just IPO'd at a ~$400m valuation.   AROUND THE WEB 📅  On this day: In 1866, French inventor Pierre Lallement received a US patent for the country's first pedal bicycle. 🐦  Game: You're a bird. 🗞️  Newsletter: CFOs. Fund managers. Power players. They read The Daily Upside. 🧀  How to: make mac & cheese, according to two Texas chefs. 🐾  Aww: We love a good air biscuit session. SHOWER THOUGHT I recently saw a science post about the younger generation having smaller jaws and larger craniums and it got me thinking: Are stereotypical aliens just future evolved humans? SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Sara "Hair today, gone tomorrow" Friedman.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.   Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Masters in Marketing  |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. HubSpot Media, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA, 02141, USA, +1 888.482.7768 Never want to hear from us again? Break our hearts and Unsubscribe.