Fiona Bao’s Genpulse has made the United States its main market, expanding its vision for physical AI in personal health. Its Lushair scanners and app track scalp changes over time, offering a starting point for personalized health monitoring rather than medical diagnosis.
New York, NY, United States, November 12, 2026 — Fiona Bao’s company began with something she could see in her own reflection. As a university student studying bioengineering, she went through hair loss herself, and the experience set her on the path to building hair and scalp tools from artificial intelligence and medical imaging. That personal starting point now carries a larger claim. Bao believes consumer health AI has spent too long listening and too little time looking, and she is taking that argument to the United States.
Her company, Genpulse, began in Singapore and is now based in San Francisco, with the United States as its main market. Bao spends much of her time there and in New York and Los Angeles, and the people backing the company include the founders of two well-known American consumer businesses, one in digital health and one in payments.
Photo Courtesy of Genpulse
An Incubator, a Clinic and 200 Salons
Genpulse started in 2023, when Bao’s founding team was accepted into the National University of Singapore’s Graduate Research Innovation Programme, known as GRIP. The hard early problem was data. A scalp analysis model is only as reliable as the images it learns from, and a young company has to gather those images before it can train anything worth selling.
The team built its own. Working with the National Skin Centre in Singapore and more than 200 salons around the world, it collected and annotated more than 30,000 medical scalp images. In April 2024, Genpulse launched its first product line, Lushair, in Singapore.
“I started the company in Asia and built Genpulse from Singapore, where we developed the first iterations of the technology and ecosystem,” Bao said.
The Gap Bao Wants to Close
Bao’s thesis is easy to state and hard to execute. Most health AI people use today waits to be told what is wrong. Genpulse gives the AI hardware of its own, so it can observe biological signals directly, track them over time and learn from what happens after it makes a recommendation.
She sums up the system in five words, sense, understand, act, track and learn. A scanner captures the signal. The AI agent interprets it and suggests what to do. The next scan shows whether the suggestion worked, and that result goes back into the agent, which becomes more specific to the person each time the cycle repeats.
“What personally interests me is the gap between how much AI knows about the world and how little context it actually has about an individual human body,” she said.
Lushair is where that idea meets customers. Its at-home scanners photograph the scalp under magnification, and the app compares each new scan with the user’s first, building a history that a single conversation with a chatbot cannot produce. The company positions Lushair as a tool for tracking change, and it directs medical questions to doctors and dermatologists.
Two Founders Who Know the Customer
Genpulse has raised its seed financing at a $40 million valuation. Two names among its backers stand out for anyone who follows American consumer technology.
Demetri Karagas co-founded Thirty Madison in 2017. The company’s first brand, Keeps, launched in January 2018 and sold hair loss treatment directly to consumers through telemedicine. That gives Genpulse a backer who has already built a business around the customer Lushair serves first.
Iqram Magdon-Ismail co-founded Venmo in 2009 with his college roommate. Braintree bought the app in 2012, and PayPal bought Braintree in 2013, according to Entrepreneur. Venmo became one of the most popular ways Americans pay each other, and that kind of repeat behavior is what Genpulse needs. A tracking product is only as useful as the number of times people return to it.
Bao sees the significance of the pairing in broader terms. “Entrepreneurs who previously helped build major consumer platforms in digital health and fintech are now backing a company exploring what happens when consumer AI moves beyond software and gains a physical sensing layer,” she said.
What the Numbers Show
Genpulse has generated about $2.5 million in cumulative revenue. Roughly $1 million has come from consumers and about $1.5 million from businesses, which can license Lushair’s analysis through an API, run salon and clinic software on it, or sell the hardware under their own brand.
The consumer side has reached more than 20,000 people. Bao treats the figure as evidence that the loop runs in the real world, with people scanning, acting on what they see and scanning again.
“Hair and scalp give us a highly visual and accessible place to begin building that loop,” she said.
Starting with hair is a practical choice. Customers can see the problem, they care about it, and progress shows up in pictures they can compare. It is a sensible place for a company with larger plans to learn how people actually use a health device at home, before it extends the same system into other areas of personal health.
The American Test
The product is ready for that market. Lushair’s devices already ship to the United States, and its app runs on iPhone, so its main market already has something customers can buy and use today.
In San Francisco, Bao is building relationships across AI, healthcare, research and consumer technology. The move puts Genpulse in the market where OpenAI first launched Health in ChatGPT, and where its scanner-first alternative will face the most direct comparison.
That comparison is the right one for her to invite. Genpulse arrives with paying customers internationally, an image library built with Singapore’s National Skin Centre, and backers who have already built American consumer brands in hair loss and payments. Bao started out trying to understand what was happening on her own scalp. The US market will now show whether the approach she built from that problem can change how millions of people track their health.
Contact Info:
Name: Fiona Bao
Email: Send Email
Organization: Genpulse
Website: https://www.genpulse.io/
Release ID: 89209348
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Source: MarketersMedia