Investors are increasingly interested in AI tools that don’t just generate insights or recommendations, but actually perform tasks autonomously to relieve busy healthcare workers.
A startup selling this type of AI system secured seed funding on Thursday — Shyld AI announced a Funding round of $13.4 million led by Aulis Capital. The Silicon Valley-based company, founded in 2022, makes AI-powered devices that are installed in hospital rooms to monitor activity and automatically trigger UV disinfection after people leave a space or touch high-touch surfaces.
The system tracks movement in the room, determines when disinfection is needed, then delivers targeted UV exposure designed to neutralize pathogens like C. diff and E. coli. It also continuously documents cleaning activity and UV coverage so hospitals have visibility into when and where disinfection took place.
A Stanford University study published this year in the American Journal of Infection Control found Shyld’s technology effective in eliminating pathogens including C. diff, E. coli, MRSA, Staph and Candida auris. He said the system reduced contamination by 93% compared to a control room.
Shyld CEO Mo Noshad, who co-founded the company with his brother Morteza, highlighted the speed of the system, saying some pathogens can be inactivated in as little as 32 seconds.
He said the platform is currently used in more than 30 hospitals. For him, the company’s value proposition is that it reduces providers’ reliance on labor-intensive workflows and reduces the risk of hospital-acquired infections.
Noshad said his interest in hospital-acquired infections intensified after a friend died from a post-surgical infection. Through research and conversations with hospitals, he came to the conclusion that existing disinfection methods were too manual to be consistent or operationally effective.
“With the manual, you have no way to control whether these processes are done correctly. There is a good chance that people will miss areas or the contact time of the chemicals will not be sufficient. There is also frequency: with the manual, there is a limit to the number of times you can [disinfect] because you depend on labor to come into the room and run these processes,” Noshad explained.
He also noted that Shyld’s devices only take 15 minutes to install. They are mounted, plugged in, and then begin collecting data and disinfecting rooms autonomously, Noshad explained.
This ease of adoption helps the startup quickly deploy devices that then collect operational data about hospital environments, he noted.
He said the company ultimately views disinfection as an entry point to broader intelligence in hospital operations. As Shyld’s devices collect more data, they will likely be able to identify problems such as missing supplies, delayed turnaround times in the operating room or excessive traffic in the rooms, Noshad said.
Ultimately, he thinks Shyld could use this information to help hospitals improve efficiency and further reduce infection risks.
Photo: Fiordaliso, Getty Images
