They built exoskeletons for stroke patients. Now, their robots can do eyelash extensions.
Fortune Amanda Gerut
A robot startup that once built exoskeletons for stroke patients now does eyelash extensions. It’s faster than a salon visit and safer by design, which is the weird part.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Amanda Gerut — read the original for the full story.
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Luum started with serious hardware. Its co-founder, Nathan Harding, previously built exoskeletons at Ekso Bionics for stroke and spinal-cord patients learning to move again. Now the same safety-first mindset is aimed at lashes, a service that sounds light until you remember it’s applied one hair at a time, up close to someone’s eyes.
Harding got the idea after a mentor described lash extensions as high-margin and addictive. He watched lash work on YouTube and saw a task that sat right at the edge of what a person can do well. Luum CEO Jo Lawson, who came aboard as president in 2023 and became CEO in 2024, said that was exactly the kind of “magically weird” problem the company wanted.
The machine is built with some very specific guardrails. The arm physically can’t touch closed eyelids, and the lash wands are flexible, featherlight, and attached with magnets weak enough to pop off if someone flinches or bumps the unit. A human lash artist still does the prep, consults on the look, and finishes the job. But the robot works on both eyes at once and can finish in about an hour, about half the time of a standard appointment, according to Lawson.
Luum says it has about 150 terabytes of session data to train on, and it still wants to get faster. The company has studios in Dallas, Newport Beach, and Oakland, and it runs machines inside some Nordstrom and Ulta stores. Three or four lash artists support each robot so it can keep going all day.
The money trail is bigger than the service sounds. Luum’s Series A closed in 2024, bringing total capital raised to $30 million, co-led by Artifact Capital and Boardman Bay Capital Management, with Ulta Beauty among earlier backers. A convertible round has since taken that total to $36 million, and Long Journey Ventures led the Series A. The company isn’t sharing revenue. It is, however, talking big: lashes are just the beachhead for a future of “intelligent beauty services” that could include eyebrow threading, shaping, microneedling, and more.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the rare beauty-robot pitch that makes more sense the more it sounds ridiculous. Start with a task that is repetitive, fragile, and annoyingly expensive, then wrap it in safety hardware borrowed from medical robotics. The industry has spent years promising automation for flashy demos; Luum at least picked something customers already pay for every two weeks.
Read more about this at: Fortune
