How 19-year-old entrepreneur Nour Khalil used Mimer AI Factory to build a smarter hairstyle app – and understand what he had actually built
| Organization | Klippvia (UF company) |
| Key players | Nour Khalil, Founder |
| Product | AI-powered hairstyle advisor |
| Support from | Björn Flintberg, Mimer AI Factory |
| Focus area | Deep learning for real-time radiotherapy treatment optimization |
| Project stage | Evaluation and improvement |
A challenge Nour Khalil knows firsthand
Nour Khalil is 19, studying economics, and has been cutting hair since eighth grade. His father has been a barber for 30 years and runs the highest-rated barbershop in the region. Khalil grew up inside that world, and what he saw there gave him the idea for Klippvia.
The problem is deceptively simple: customers and barbers often don’t speak the same language.
Men come in and they say, ‘just do it, make it look good.’ And I will make it look good – to me. But then they might see good in another way. And even though I put all I have into the cut, they will go out and they will not be happy.
Nour Khalil, founder of Klippvia
He sees this challenge from both sides. For experienced and highly-rated barbers like his father, every client interaction matters – a single misunderstanding can cost a five-star rating. For newer barbers, the problem is compounded: they are still developing their technical skills and their ability to communicate. When those two things are both weak at the same time, mistakes become harder to recover from and progress slows down.
Khalil’s solution? Klippvia.
What Klippvia does
The app works as an AI consultant that meets the customer before they ever sit in the chair. A user opens the app, takes a photo, and answers a set of questions about their preferences, lifestyle, and goals. The AI analyses their face shape, hair type, skin tone, hair texture and thickness, and other physical factors – then combines that with what the user has told it about their daily life, job, how much time they want to spend on styling, and what kind of impression they want to make.
The result is a set of personalised hairstyle recommendations, complete with AI-generated images showing what each style would look like on the user. If they find one they like, they can book an appointment directly, and all the information gets sent to the barber in advance. As Khalil puts it: “beforehand, when you go there, they already know. They are more prepared. You don’t need to explain the same way.”
The app also generates step-by-step maintenance guides and product recommendations tailored to the user’s specific hair type and budget. On the business side, it offers tools for salons to manage client relationships, predict when regulars are due for a visit, and respond to reviews.
The system takes into account a striking range of detail: geographic location and regional style trends, age, how often someone gets haircuts, whether they want a result from the first appointment or are building toward something over several months. It even accounts for practical constraints — if someone has very short hair, it won’t recommend styles that would take months to grow into, unless they want to build toward them.
How Mimer AI Factory supported Klippvia
Khalil built Klippvia largely on his own, working with AI coding tools – also known as “vibe coding.” He is the first to acknowledge the limits of that approach: “I don’t have much experience, both on the business side and the technical side.”
The connection to Mimer started with a LinkedIn post. Björn Flintberg, from Mimer, saw what Khalil was building and reached out. Khalil took the chance.
There is something special about young entrepreneurs. While most of our clients are established companies, often with advanced tools and established pipelines for AI use, young people like Nour are part of Sweden’s future. I always think to myself when we work with younger clients in Mimer: ‘This could be the next Lovable, the next Minecraft, the next Spotify.’
Björn Flintberg, Mimer AI Factory
The resulting collaboration produced two in-depth evaluation reports: one on the technical architecture and AI pipeline and one on the business’ fundamentals. Together they ran to around 25 pages of dense, actionable analysis.
What the technical review found surprised Khalil. Despite having built it without formal training, Klippvia already had a sophisticated AI pipeline — multi-step hair analysis, a structured knowledge base of hairstyles, a feedback loop for improving recommendations over time, and a full business dashboard for salons. The codebase contained more than 150,000 lines.
In the technical report, there were tips for improvement, more quality, more functions. It was really valuable. I took every single piece of information there and worked on it for weeks. – Nour Khalil
What comes next
Khalil is still working through the recommendations from the evaluation. His next goal is to build out a structured knowledge base so that the AI relies less on open-ended reasoning and more on verified, curated information. This is the kind of work that benefits from deeper technical expertise, and he is currently building a small team of software developers through a partnership with a program at Linköping University.
He also sees more potential ahead with Mimer – particularly accessing computing power and leveraging connections with AI experts, once he has the right technical people on his team to make the most of those resources.
There is also a broader ambition. Khalil sees Klippvia not just as an app for individual clients, but as a tool that could change how people enter the hairdressing profession. Young barbers who learn informally, like from social media, often lack the foundational knowledge that comes with formal training. Klippvia, he believes, could become part of how that changes.
Having Mimer’s name next to Klippvia helps me a lot in connecting with different parties. Now it sounds more concrete, more reliable. – Nour Khalil
More than just technical support
Beyond the technical output, Khalil talks about something less tangible but equally important: credibility. “I am young and I am inexperienced,” he says. “Just having Mimer as a partner, just telling that to potential clients or partners is a very strong thing to have. It makes them feel that this is for real.”
He gives a concrete example: a trade publication specifically highlighted the Mimer connection when writing about Klippvia, citing it as a signal of seriousness and reliability.