KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- Mohammad Noshad founded Shyld AI in 2022 after losing a close friend to a hospital-acquired infection following a routine surgery.
- Before Shyld AI, Noshad completed his PhD in 2.5 years, developed frontier AI models and technologies at Harvard, and built and exited two prior technology companies.
- Mohammad Noshad’s thesis is that hospital AI should take real-time action inside clinical areas, an approach validated by a peer-reviewed study from Stanford University showing more than a 93 percent reduction in contamination.
Mohammad Noshad has spent the past three years building a company that now sits inside more than 30 U.S. hospitals, taking real-time action on patient safety in the rooms where care happens. The company is Shyld AI, and in early 2026, it closed a $13.4 million seed round led by Aulis Capital, one of the largest early-stage healthcare AI rounds of the year. Behind the milestone is a founder who came to healthcare AI through a personal experience that reshaped the rest of his career.
Noshad’s path to Shyld AI began with the loss of a close friend who walked into a hospital for surgery and developed an infection that she did not survive. The infection was one of the roughly 72,000 healthcare-associated infections that contribute to patient deaths in the United States each year, according to the most recent CDC data. Noshad started looking at the existing systems hospitals use to prevent these infections and concluded that the work depended too heavily on consistent human execution under conditions where consistency was almost impossible to guarantee.
“With manual, there’s no way for you to monitor if these processes are being done properly,” Noshad told MedCity News in May 2026. “There’s a good chance that people are missing areas, or the contact time of the chemicals is not enough. There’s also frequency, with manual, there’s a limit for how many times you can disinfect because you depend on labor to go into the room and run those processes.” That observation became the foundation on which Shyld AI was built.
The years of work that prepared him for this
Noshad’s path to Shyld AI was not an obvious one. He completed his PhD in two and a half years, a timeline that most candidates take twice as long to finish, and spent years afterward as an AI researcher at Harvard. Before founding Shyld AI, he had already built and exited two companies in different industries, including IoT and space connectivity. Each project required learning a new physical domain quickly and translating advances in AI into systems built for real-world deployment in industries far from academic research.
That breadth shaped how he thought about healthcare, where most AI companies entering hospitals were focused on the digital layer, building software that read electronic medical records and generated insights for clinicians to interpret. Noshad was interested in the physical layer, the rooms themselves, and the surfaces patients touched between visits. He believed AI within those spaces could intervene directly as events unfolded, while clinical staff were focused on the patient in front of them.
His brother Morteza, who holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, joined him as co-founder and lead architect for VERTEX, the foundation model that runs on Shyld AI’s devices. Morteza’s technical depth in real-time machine learning gave the company the engineering foundation needed to build AI that runs at the edge inside hospital rooms, processing data on-site for immediate response without cloud dependence.
Where he wants to take Shyld AI next
Noshad describes Shyld AI’s approach in plain terms: most healthcare AI today generates dashboards and recommendations that clinical staff must act on later. His thesis is that AI in hospitals should act in the moment, removing the lag between detection and response. He describes this approach as Active AI, systems that perceive, decide, and take action autonomously rather than simply generating dashboards or recommendations for clinicians to act on later.. The wall-mounted devices Shyld AI installs inside hospital rooms detect cross-contamination events in real time and deliver targeted UV-C disinfection within seconds, fully autonomously and without input from the clinical and environmental services teams working in those rooms.
The clinical case for the approach has been formally validated. A peer-reviewed Stanford University study, published in the American Journal of Infection Control, found that Shyld AI’s system reduced cumulative microbial bioburden by more than 93 percent compared with a control room running standard manual disinfection protocols.
Noshad’s longer vision extends beyond infection control and he sees disinfection as an entry point into broader hospital operations intelligence. Beyond infection control, the company has expanded into operating room workflow intelligence and efficiency, helping identify missing items and supplies before procedures, reduce turnover delays, and bring its platform into pharmaceutical cleanroom environments..
When asked what drives him to keep pushing in a notoriously slow-moving industry, Noshad returns to where he started, the friend whose death set the company in motion. Shyld AI now operates inside dozens of hospitals across the United States. Each room the company enters is one room where the outcome that took his friend’s life is less likely to repeat for another patient.
To learn more about Mohammad Noshad and Shyld AI’s technology, visit shyld.ai or connect with him on LinkedIn.
About Mohammad Noshad
Mohammad Noshad is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shyld AI, where he is pioneering the use of Physical AI Agents to bring real-time operational intelligence and automation into hospital environments. He also serves as a Strategic Advisor at Field AI. With a background in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in AI, he led cutting edge research at Harvard University in AI and Machine Learning. His work has been cited over 2,500 times and has received several best paper awards. His experience spans robotics and space connectivity, and he is now focused on building technology that helps save lives globally. To learn more, visit https://www.shyld.ai/
