Today we’d like to introduce you to Alycea Adams.
Hi Alycea, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have always been curious and I always struggled finding hair products that worked for my curls. Most of childhood years, I shied away from wearing my curly hair until I started to embrace my natural journey. Along the journey, I decided to digitally document my hair journey on YouTube, and I took a random leap of faith and posted my hair routine videos on TikTok. In August of 2022, I posted a 60-second hair video and went to sleep. Little did I know that video would accumulate millions of views and start my journey of being a content creator…
Over the past 3 years, I have dived into content creation to destigmatize black women and their natural hair by sharing my natural hair journey as a college cheerleader. I posted video content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and I found that the black community welcomed me with open arms and trusted my expertise in the hair care space.
In June of 2023, I received an email, which I thought was a scam, from an agent from Dulcedo Influencers that was inquiring about talent agency representation. I had no idea about talent agencies or social media monetization, but I agreed to meet with the agent because she was a black woman. I trusted her because she represented who I am, and that was the best decision I have ever made in life. I signed as a talent with Dulcedo Influencers, and I have since built my social media presence from 42K+ to 1.3M+ in only two years of being with Dulcedo. I have activated brand campaigns for major brands such as Aveda, Amazon, Dove, Shea Moisture, Mielle Organics, and Sephora. More recently, I was selected as a creator for Sephora Squad 2025!
As a content creator, I wore several hats as a full-time college student, college cheerleader, and start-up founder. In May 2025, I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Information and Double Minors in Entrepreneurship and Urban Studies, Summa Cum Laude. Also, I am a proud member of Phi Beta Kappa. While at Carolina, I was heavily involved in the Shuford Program of Entrepreneurship, where I served as an ambassador for the minor. In this role, I was able to explore my entrepreneurial spirit, and I decided to build an app that related to my pain point of my natural hair journey: finding products that worked.
In the summer of 2023, I completed a business strategy IT internship with Delta Airlines. That’s where I met Matt Steele, a Georgia Tech student interning on the software side. We quickly became friends, bonding over our competitive and entrepreneurial mindset. Though our hair care experiences were vastly different, Matt — who swam competitively —understood the challenge of trying to restore damaged hair.
When I started to seriously imagine an app, later naming it HairMatch, I reached out to Matt, knowing he could help bring her vision to life. Together, they built the app, using his coding and user interface/user experience design skills, and incorporated a vision-language model to analyze hair types.
In one of my entrepreneurship classes, I thought deeply about her users, developing key personas — like moms with daughters who have different hair textures. I leveraged my large social media presence to perform customer validation on an app with this type of recommendation functionality. HairMatch evolved to include step-by-step style guides, explanations for tricky ingredients like sulfates and insight into how treatments like highlights or heat styling affect different hair types. HairMatch uses users’ hair types to recommend personalized product matches, bridging the gap in natural hair care with innovation and intention.
In November 2024, HairMatch launched on the Apple App Store for iOS users, and we hit the ground running. Since launch, HairMatch has seen over 5,000 downloads, 500+ paying users and active engagement from people in 78 countries. We decided to take our talents and apply for the 2025 Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition. Microsoft Imagine Cup is the premier global technology competition for student founders leveraging AI to push the boundaries of innovation. HairMatch was selected out of thousands of startup applications from over 50+ countries to be one of three finalists at the final competition in Seattle, Washington at Microsoft Build. HairMatch struck success and was named a runner-up as a 2025 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship, winning $25K for our startup. I credit skills I honed in the classroom such as public speaking and design thinking. I am extremely thankful for an Innovate Carolina’s 1789 Student Venture Fund grant that helped propel HairMatch updates and iterations.
At Microsoft Build, I was HairMatch’s speaker and share the story of why the synergy of hair care and AI is important to people with curly hair. My work as a creator allowed me to build trust with the curly hair community, and utilize my skills in storytelling and video creation to speak on a global stage.
Since graduating, I have embarked on my journey of having a dual career within two very different industries: technology and social media. From 9 to 5, I work full-time with a large tech company, while still building my personal brand as a creator and entrepreneur. Recently, I even passed my real estate course exam for the state of Georgia because I am passionate about exploring real estate from an entrepreneurial lens. Bottom line is I am have a deep-rooted curiosity for learning, and I believe that’s how I make myself a better well-rounded person. I see myself as a role model for other young black girls to know that anything is possible if you commit to it.
I attribute my success to my discipline in my academic career. My older brother has been the sound board in my life that I have viewed as my role model because he was a key person who conceived me to give a degree in technology a chance. Since middle school, I took my education seriously because I knew that was my golden ticket to going to college for free, and that’s exactly what I did. I spent countless hours a day studying, involving with extracurriculars, and participating in sports to learn how to be successful inside and out of the classroom. These habits that I developed early on have paid off because I have graduated debt-free with honors. But more importantly, I set myself apart as a qualified candidate for the workforce because I have been an entrepreneur since I was 18-years old. Entrepreneurship has exposed me to so many valuable wins and losses that have added to my understanding of what I want out of life.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
No journey that is worth it is easy, and my life has been the definition of this statement. Outside of the uncontrollable life events such as losing loved ones, I faced a lot of soul searching of figuring out what I wanted to focus on in college. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but because I wanted to do everything if I could.
In high school, I applied to 20+ universities because I had no idea where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to go somewhere with a big game-day presence and great academics. I faced with over 20 acceptances and hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships, and I didn’t know where to commit. At first, I was reluctant to accept a full-ride from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill because it was close to home and I was familiar with the university. Ultimately, I decided to commit to Chapel Hill, and it was one of the best decisions I made for my education and career.
I have dealt with a lot of self-induced anxiety throughout college because I hold myself to a high standard, but I have learned that giving yourself grace is a wonderful tool to unlock doors that I couldn’t even imagine. Being an entrepreneur is hard and that is just the landscape of the game, so I leaned on my professors for support and mentorship to reassure me that I belong. In many spaces that I occupy, especially in technology, I tend to be the one of few black women, so I have felt imposter syndrome at times. That feeling is an indicator that I am exactly where I need to be, and I have worked for ever accolade that stacks my resume.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Matt Steele and Alycea Adams were summer interns at Delta Air Lines in Atlanta when they found a common interest in hair care. We started working on the HairMatch app in earnest at the start of the 2024/2025 school year.
Steele, a computer science major at Georgia Tech and competitive swimmer, shaved his head because chlorine had so damaged his hair. Adams, an information technology major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had grown an impressive social media following around her curly hair care journey. As technologists and entrepreneurs at heart, Steele and Adams started to explore what it would look like to have a platform that could identify different hair types and ultimately give suggestions around personalized products.
Users download the HairMatch app and fill out a quick quiz about their current hair knowledge. After that, the user takes two pictures of their hair (including one a close-up shot of their curl patterns). The startup’s AI provides an analysis on the photo, giving users information on their hair type, porosity, and texture.
“From there, [HairMatch] allows you to directly access a curated list of products that are meant for your specific hair type,” Steele told Hypepotamus. The app also provides learning modules to help those with thick curls better understand how to take care of and style their hair.
In its early days, HairMatch got initial feedback and customers from Adams’ sizable social media following (she has over 884k followers on TikTok who watch her hair tutorials).
In just a few months after launching, HairMatch was downloaded and used in over 30 countries. That number has grown dramatically as the HairMatch team comes up on a year of work.
For Steele, building HairMatch is about building something that makes an impact.
“I want to build products for people,” he added. “I want to bring technology to places where historically, technology hasn’t been utilized [to improve] someone’s life.”
To grow on a technical side, HairMatch has leveraged partnerships with Microsoft. The startup uses Azure AI Foundry to host its Vision Language Model, which processes image data and enhances HairMatch’s analysis.
Now, HairMatch was named a runner-up finalist for the 2025 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship, winning $25K for our startup
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck in my life has unfolded in the people who have walked into my life and I have been diligent about fostering relationships with these people. I stand by the mantra that it’s not what you know, but it’s what you know and who knows you. Networking is the most powerful tool that I have picked up in life, and my willingness to connect with people has propelled me far in life. Knowledge is powerful, but it”s even more powerful when you share it across your network.
Pricing:
- $5.99/Month HairMatch Subscription
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.hairmatchapp.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alycearae/?hl=en
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alycea-adams-8a983522a/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alycearae
