They built exoskeletons for stroke patients. Now, their robots can do eyelash extensions

Amanda Gerut here, pinch hitting for Allie. I was born into a family of sparse eyelashes. Some people have thick, natural doe eyes; for others it’s Maybelline; but for me nothing really worked. Mascara makes me look like spiders are climbing out of my eyeballs, but without darkened lashes, I don’t look particularly alive. I discovered lash extensions after I moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and I’ve been paying for them in hours and dollars on a biweekly basis ever since.  

Enter the robot, made by a startup called Luum. Before Nathan Harding co-founded Luum, he co-founded Ekso Bionics, which built wearable robots that got stroke and spinal-cord patients rehabbing and relearning how to move after a disability. In that world, the wrong kind of robot can kill someone, said Luum CEO Jo Lawson. 

Harding turned a gimlet-eyed focus on lashes after a mentor bought an extension franchise business and described the service to Harding—high-margin, addictive, and applied one hair at a time. Harding watched lash artistry on YouTube, and decided it sat right at the edge of human capability, and concluded it would be a great job for a robot, said Lawson. She joined Luum as president in 2023 after more than 15 years in marketing and product roles at Apple, PayPal, and Movado, and was named CEO in 2024, which allowed Harding to step back into the CTO seat. What sold her on the job, she said, was getting to work on something “magically weird”—a phrase used by Long Journey Ventures, the fund that led Luum’s Series A. 

That round closed in 2024 and brought capital raised to $30 million, co-led by Artifact Capital and Boardman Bay Capital Management, with Ulta Beauty among Luum’s earlier backers. A convertible round since has brought the total to $36 million, said Luum CFO Tai Hsia. Gordie Nye—former CEO of the company that developed a fat-freezing procedure known as CoolSculpting—chairs the board.

The exoskeleton background, with a focus on safety, shows up in the way Lawson described the hardware. That’s when I went from curious to very intrigued. The arm is built so it physically can’t touch your closed eyelids, said Lawson, and the wands that tend to your lashes are........

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