Christelle Mombo-Zigah and Dr. Isi Idemudia share a commitment to addressing AI bias in the Black community.
Mombo-Zigah is based in Silicon Valley. Watching her loved ones pursue tech careers inspired her to pivot from banking. In 2013, she joined Cisco Meraki and has been promoted several times at Cisco. She currently leads global strategy and planning for CX renewals of cloud AI infrastructure.
Mombo-Zigah recalled learning more about AI in 2020. Cisco offered several machine learning courses, which made her more aware of biases in the company’s AI tools. This motivated her to serve on the Responsible AI Committee from 2022 to 2024.
“I actually identified pretty big ones around the lack of diversity in the data that we are used to train some of our technologies. So I raised my hand, and I started working with the data scientists at Cisco,” Mombo-Zigah told AFROTECH™ in an interview. “That helped me to join our Responsible AI Committee and to really advocate for not only our six existing responsible AI principles but also to advocate for inclusiveness and intersectionality in AI. So that was my very first introduction to AI from my own learning and then identifying a big problem at Cisco relative to AI, and then working at solving this problem with data scientists. And I haven’t left the realm of AI since then.”
She added, “I continued my learning … All the work that I did on my own and all the advocacy that I started doing actually enabled me to not only get a role at Cisco in that field because they were seeing my work but also to continue to develop my own AI company.”
In 2020, she launched an AI project called Digital Colorism. She said it assessed hyperrealistic representations of the Black community in digital spaces and AI tools. Mombo-Zigah connected with Dr. Isi Idemudia, who has experience in AI governance and had developed her own platform to address AI bias. They combined their backgrounds to launch FairScan AI, which initially focused on healthcare but has since pivoted to beauty tech.
StyleMyCrown is a product launched under FairScan AI. It’s described as an AI-native textured-hair platform built on two pillars: identity preservation and realism. It features a proprietary deep-tech virtual try-on engine designed to “preserve real human identity across coils, kinks, and complex braids without distortion,” Mombo-Zigah said.
“We really centered our platform around where we were seeing the biggest gap in the market, which was Black and textured hair,” she mentioned. “So anytime we were trying those AI tools, even though they were doing a lot of advertising on Pinterest or YouTube towards Black people, when you were clicking on those platforms, the first image was a white person. Then when you were looking at the catalog, on all their virtual try-on transformation, the catalog was mainly Eurocentric, and you had maybe two or three Black-centered hairstyles, locs, dreadlocks, afros, cornrows, braids, and so on and so forth.”
She continued, “We were really seeing a gap knowing that we are still the community that invests and consumes the most of those products. We tend to spend four times more than other communities on our hair and in hair products, and so on. And we were still not seeing ourselves fully represented.”
The platform’s mobile website states that it will never sell users’ photos or keep them to train AI models. To create a preview, it sends a photo to OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Base44.
“We are just using those models for the sake of the transformation … And Base44 is where we built our platform. So we really wanted to be transparent in terms of this is what is happening with your photo,” she said.
StyleMyCrown offers a catalog of 500 hairstyles and color combinations, primarily for hair textures ranging from 3A to 4C. After users choose a style that suits their face shape and skin tone, the platform recommends products to help them achieve and maintain the look. It also recommends nearby hairstylists.
StyleMyCrown attracted visitors from 50 countries at launch. The platform is free for users, while brands and stylists must pay to be featured. It also earns affiliate commissions on sales that originate from StyleMyCrown and lead to a brand’s website. At the time of writing, 15 to 20 brands had joined the platform, with a current preference for Black-owned businesses.
“We do believe in group economics. We do believe that we can be sustainable among us … We might in the future onboard non-Black-owned brands, but we have other qualifiers. Those brands need to ensure that the products are not going to be harmful for our health,” she said.
Mombo-Zigah also revealed the founders are building relationships with venture capitalists but have not formally begun fundraising at the time of this writing.