Did you go bald? There is an AI for that

For Cyriac Lefort, the idea for his new startup, MyHair AI, came two years ago. The French native was sitting in a salon in New York getting a routine haircut when his stylist looked at him and said, “You’re starting to lose a little bit of hair,” recalled Lefort, who is 32.

“He didn’t say that to my friend who was sitting next to me, just to me,” Lefort continued. “In my mind, I wasn’t bald, and I still don’t think I am. But when someone tells you you’re losing your hair, you buy whatever they’re suggesting.”

So he bought the shampoo suggested by the hairdresser and left thinking that anyone could sell a man anything by telling him that he was losing his hair. “Hair loss is such an emotional topic for men and women,” she said.

This interaction led him down a rabbit hole where he discovered how confusing the hair loss industry is, with so much misinformation and clinics with unverified reviews. (He later went to a hair doctor who told him he wasn’t actually bald.)

Lefort wanted to create a product that, using AI, would help men diagnose hair loss.

Lefort is a serial entrepreneur, having exited one company and currently runs two others Thielen Babnikwho is 28. The duo decided to team up and create a third company: MyHair AI. They coded the product in just a few weeks. Here’s how it works: Users take photos of their heads and upload them to the MyHair app. AI technology analyzes these photos to measure hair density and detect early signs of hair loss.

Over time, as a user uploads more photos, the AI ​​tracks the progression of hair loss, allowing people to create personalized hair loss prevention routines. Users can also find specialists or discover clinics through the platform and read verified reviews so they don’t get scammed.

“Our AI tells you what’s really going on with your hair, matches you with products that make sense for your hair type, and explains the science behind them, including potential side effects,” Lefort said. “By bringing transparency and medical precision to this $50 billion market, we believe we can completely revolutionize the way people understand, treat and shop for hair health.”

It took about a year of ideation, a few weeks of vibe coding in Cursor, a few months of scientific and clinical validation, and a few more weeks of building a consumer app before the duo was ready to launch MyHair.AI. The company launched this summer.

“We didn’t hire anyone for the original prototype; it was fully coded with vibe,” he said, adding that now that the product is developed, their engineers handle the code to ensure it’s stable and scalable. MyHair AI is one of many examples of how quickly startups can be built these days with the rise of vibe coding prototypes.

Lefort said the product already has more than 1,000 paying subscribers and 200,000 user accounts. The app has analyzed more than 300,000 scalp photos and has partnerships that allow specialists and clinics to access MyHair AI so they can assess their patients faster. On Wednesday, the company announced that Dr. Tess, famous dermatologistjoins the company’s board of directors.

Others on the market mainly include Hims. Lefort said MyHair is different from others because the product is one of the few that built a proprietary AI model, trained on more than 300,000 hair images, to diagnose baldness — rather than using a more generic LLM to do so.

Lefort said the company is now focused on expansion. He wants to create a booking platform and work with more clinics. It hopes to create AI that works in the “real world.”

“Men worry about two things in their health, sexual dysfunction and hair loss,” Lefort said. “We’re dealing with one of the biggest daily concerns.”