Key Takeaways:
- Peer-reviewed research at Stanford, published in AJIC, showed that Shyld AI’s autonomous UV-C system reduced hospital surface contamination by more than 93%.
- Mohammad Noshad and his brother Morteza launched Shyld AI in 2022 in response to Mohammad losing a close friend to a hospital-acquired infection.
- Aulis Capital led Shyld AI’s $13.4 million seed round, and the company now operates devices in more than 30 U.S. hospitals.
Shyld AI has moved fast through healthcare over the past few years. The company sits inside more than 30 U.S. hospitals and closed a $13.4 million seed round led by Aulis Capital in early 2026, among healthcare AI’s biggest early-stage rounds this year. For company founder and CEO Mohammad Noshad, the milestone marks the reward of years of work traceable to a personal experience.
That personal thread runs back to a close friend who went in for routine surgery and did not survive an infection contracted at the hospital. The loss shaped the venture Noshad and his brother Morteza started building in 2022, aimed at delivering real-time patient safety at the point of care. CDC data continues to attribute roughly 72,000 U.S. deaths each year to healthcare-associated infections, and Shyld AI is working to lower that number one facility at a time.
A device engineered to take action
A Shyld AI device mounts on the wall like a smoke detector, small enough to blend into a patient room. Inside the unit sits a stack of onboard sensors paired with a calibrated UV-C emitter, running continuously without any input from clinical staff working nearby.
The sensor system reads the room in real time and picks out moments of cross-contamination risk, such as a keyboard being touched by a caregiver or a surface remaining exposed during patient changeover. Once the AI recognizes an event, the UV-C emitter delivers a targeted pulse that inactivates pathogens within seconds. The full cycle happens autonomously.
That level of autonomy sets Shyld AI apart from most healthcare AI on the market. Most systems monitor conditions and generate dashboards or alerts, effectively handing decision-making to clinical staff who need to interpret the signals and act on them. Shyld AI’s premise is that software running inside a hospital room should complete the workflow it observes, executing on what it detects.
Powering the autonomy is VERTEX, Shyld AI’s proprietary foundation model built for real-time decision-making inside physical environments. Developed in partnership with NVIDIA, VERTEX runs on each device using onboard GPU compute, avoiding any dependency on hospital cloud infrastructure.
That design keeps the system responsive during network outages and processes environmental data locally, without any video or personally identifiable data leaving the room. The closed-loop, HIPAA-compliant architecture has helped accelerate approval cycles with hospital IT and compliance teams, and installing a Shyld AI unit resembles mounting a smoke detector more than integrating a clinical system.
Peer-reviewed proof and the founders driving Shyld AI
Shyld AI’s clinical case has been through formal peer review at a leading U.S. academic medical center. A Stanford University study published in the American Journal of Infection Control tracked Shyld AI’s autonomous system over multiple weeks inside one of the hospital’s most demanding clinical environments. The result showed cumulative microbial bioburden dropping by more than 93% against a control room following standard manual disinfection.
That evidence has fueled commercial traction. Shyld AI has installed its technology in more than 30 U.S. hospitals and consistently closes deals within an eight- to ten-week window, ahead of the twelve- to eighteen-month cycles typical of hospital technology procurement.
“We’re moving the industry from passive AI to Active AI, technology that understands how hospitals operate and improves workflows in real time without adding burden to clinical teams,” said Mohammad Noshad, founder and CEO of Shyld AI.
Noshad brings academic depth and operator experience to the company. He earned his PhD in an accelerated two-and-a-half-year run, then spent several years as an AI researcher at Harvard. He founded and exited two other companies before turning to healthcare with Shyld AI. His brother Morteza serves as co-founder, holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford, and designed the technical architecture powering VERTEX.
The vision extending past hospital walls
Infection control is Shyld AI’s opening move into hospitals, but Noshad’s ambition extends into every physical environment where contamination or operational lag creates real cost. Inside the operating room, Shyld AI’s devices already track surgical readiness, catch missing instruments before procedures begin, monitor workflow phases, and flag preventable delays. Since each minute of OR time carries hundreds of dollars in costs, small delays add up to significant losses across a schedule.
Outside the hospital, the company has begun engaging with pharmaceutical partners to bring its technology into cleanroom contamination control for sterile manufacturing environments. Capital from the seed round is underwriting new hospital deployments and the engineering work required to adapt VERTEX for these additional settings.
At the company level, Noshad’s ambition is category-defining. Shyld AI is building action-based AI for physical infrastructure, a class of technology that did not have a name a few years ago. The company started with one personal loss and now runs inside dozens of U.S. hospitals, working to keep the outcome that took his friend’s life from repeating for other patients.
To learn more about Shyld AI’s technology or schedule a demo, visit shyld.ai or connect with Mohammad Noshad on LinkedIn.
About Shyld AI
Shyld AI is a healthcare technology company bringing physical agentic AI to hospital operations. Founded by CEO and Co-Founder Mohammad Noshad, Shyld AI develops autonomous physical agents that streamline hospital operations like infection control, OR efficiency, and compliance, without adding workload for staff. Its technology combines AI with UV disinfection to reduce environmental contamination by up to 93%. Shyld AI is deployed across hospitals nationwide, improving clinical care, efficiency, and cost savings. To learn more, visit www.shyld.ai/