Meet the Network: Udaya Malla, Founder and CEO of Shiro AI

The Life Sciences & Health ecosystem within the Rotterdam region is a dynamic network of companies, service providers, educational institutes, healthcare providers, and more, working together to innovate in healthcare. In this series, we would like you to get to know this network. This time, we would like to introduce you to Udaya Malla, Founder and CEO of Shiro AI. 

Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?

Hi, I’m Udaya Malla, founder and CEO of Shiro AI. I have spent 10+ years in eye care, product development, and healthcare commercialization. Before Shiro, I helped bring one medical device and two AI solutions to market, and I previously built and exited an AI company. That experience taught me that powerful algorithms alone do not transform care: they must fit clinical reality, reduce friction, and earn clinicians’ trust.

What does Shiro AI do, and what kind of work does your team focus on?

In many hospitals, a patient’s story is fragmented across the electronic patient record, imaging systems, and diagnostic tools. At every follow-up, clinicians must search across these systems and mentally reconstruct what changed, why a decision was made, and what needs attention next. Shiro AI adds a persistent clinical memory and contextual intelligence layer to the hospital’s existing infrastructure. It connects the relevant history across visits, systems, decisions, and time, then surfaces the patient context a clinician needs without replacing the systems already in use.

A simple way to describe it is: Shiro helps clinical systems remember. Instead of rebuilding the patient story at every visit, a clinician can quickly understand what changed, how key findings relate, and which prior decisions still matter. Shiro supports the clinician; it does not replace clinical judgment. We are starting in glaucoma, where longitudinal imaging, measurements, and clinical notes make this problem especially visible. Our functional platform has already assembled patient context in under one second in preliminary validation, compared with roughly 5.5-8 minutes of manual reconstruction. The next step is formal validation at scale. We are building Shiro with our CTO, Yagnic, and a specialist advisory team, in close collaboration with clinicians. The Rotterdam Eye Hospital is our clinical founding partner, and we also have a research collaboration with Erasmus MC’s Department of Ophthalmology.

What are you currently looking for within the Life Sciences & Health network?

Our most important priority is proving that Shiro can scale across hospitals and specialties. Ophthalmology is our clinical starting point, not the boundary of the platform. We would value introductions in five areas:

Multi-hospital and cross-specialty validation partners
Hospitals and clinical departments willing to validate Shiro first in ophthalmology and then in other data-heavy consultations where clinicians must reconstruct longitudinal context across notes, imaging, measurements and diagnostic systems. Hospital innovation, IT and transformation leaders. Leaders exploring how Shiro’s zero-integration Visual Context Agents can add value across existing EPD, PACS and diagnostic environments. The agents can interpret the information already visible in clinical workflows, reducing dependence on deep API projects, system replacement, or a single vendor.

Pre-seed investors
We are raising a €750K pre-seed round to complete multi-site clinical validation, strengthen deployment and compliance, and prepare for repeatable hospital adoption. We are especially interested in investors who understand healthcare IT, clinical workflow, digital health infrastructure, and long hospital buying cycles.

Regulatory, security and procurement expertise
Partners who can help us mature our GDPR, information-security, quality-management and medical-device boundary strategy, and navigate hospital procurement requirements across Europe.

Research, distribution and non-dilutive funding partners
We welcome research collaborations around longitudinal clinical data, imaging and genomics; introductions to EPD, PACS, diagnostic and health-platform partners; and relevant Dutch or European funding opportunities, including NWO, ZonMw, EIT Health and RVO programmes.

What are some of the exciting developments or plans that you’re currently working on?

Near term: prove value and repeatability.  With the Rotterdam Eye Hospital, we are progressing from preliminary validation toward a structured 200-300 patient study.

We will measure time saved, information completeness, clinician confidence, workflow friction, and the potential effect on outpatient capacity. Shiro already reconstructs longitudinal patient context. The next evolution is a richer continuity engine that links findings, interventions, prior reasoning, and outcomes – so it can surface not only what happened, but what is relevant now and why.

We also plan to incorporate relevant patient-reported information, such as wellbeing updates and questionnaires, so the clinical view can be prepared around the purpose of the next visit before the patient enters the room.

Date: October 26, 2026