Arish Shahab
Founder of Amano; ML researcher at Harvard, JHU, UHN
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Arish Shahab is a biomedical engineer and entrepreneur from Oakville, Ontario, currently studying at McMaster University while co-founding Amano — a Founders Inc–backed startup building the world's most affordable hearing aid — and conducting machine learning research at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, and the University Health Network. He is one of the youngest founders to have both an acquired exit and active institutional research appointments simultaneously with his undergraduate studies. His self-described mission is "building accessible, affordable solutions to real-world medical challenges." 1
Arish's entrepreneurial career began before he finished secondary school. In 2020, while most of his peers were navigating remote learning during the pandemic, he founded AquaBoost — an early-detection platform for rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition in which damaged muscle tissue releases proteins into the bloodstream, leading to kidney failure if undetected. The condition is most commonly seen in athletes, military personnel, and patients after trauma or certain drug exposures.
The clinical insight behind AquaBoost was that rhabdomyolysis is frequently missed because its early symptoms — muscle pain, weakness, dark urine — are non-specific. Early detection requires tracking creatine kinase levels, which standard point-of-care tests do not catch automatically. Arish built an early-detection system to flag at-risk patients before the condition became critical 1.
AquaBoost was backed by Buildspace, Y Combinator's community-focused builder program, and ultimately resulted in a successful acquisition — an unusual outcome for any founder, let alone one in high school. The exit gave Arish both a financial runway and a pattern of evidence that clinical detection problems were tractable from a software-first approach 1.
In September 2024, Arish enrolled in McMaster University's integrated Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences (iBioMed) program — a joint program between McMaster's Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Health Sciences designed specifically for students who want to bridge clinical medicine and engineering. In the Fall 2024 edition of The Frequency, McMaster Engineering Society's newsletter, Arish introduced himself as "a first-year iBioMed student passionate about merging engineering and healthcare to create innovative solutions." 2
By the time he enrolled, he had already secured research appointments that would have been competitive for graduate students:
Hamilton Health Sciences (Clinical Researcher, Jun 2024 – Sep 2025): Orthopaedic research at one of Canada's largest academic health sciences centers, embedded within the same hospital system that would later become one of Amano's validation partners 1.
Johns Hopkins University (Computational Neuroscience Researcher, Oct 2024 – Jan 2026): Building ML-driven computational models to study brain function and disease as part of JHU's AI in Neuroscience research program 1.
Harvard Medical School + Massachusetts General Hospital (ML Researcher, Jan 2025 – present): Applying machine learning and finite element analysis (FEA) to musculoskeletal biomechanics. This role connects directly to his earlier work at AlgoSurg and to Amano's broader mission of making medical hardware more computationally intelligent 1.
RBC Borealis (ML Researcher, Sep – Dec 2025): Performing volumetric brain analysis with machine learning for early neurodegeneration detection. The role was part of RBC's AI research institute, where Aaron Yu also participated in a parallel program the same term — the overlap that likely deepened the founding team's relationship 1.
University Health Network (ML Researcher, Nov 2025 – present): Training machine learning models on rehabilitation data at Canada's largest research hospital network 1.
AlgoSurg (Software Engineer, Nov 2025 – Apr 2026): AlgoSurg is a YC W18 company focused on computational surgical planning. Arish developed FEA systems to automate orthopedic surgical planning — directly adjacent to his Harvard research and to Amano's surgical validation relationships 1.
In August 2025, Arish co-founded Amano with Aaron Yu and Ramin Syed. The impetus was a pattern he and Aaron had both noticed across their clinical and research experiences: hearing loss is one of the most prevalent and undertreated conditions in the world, and the primary barrier is cost and access, not technology. The devices to help people hear better already exist. The problem is that they cost as much as a used car.
Amano's approach — 3D-printed housings, ML-optimized fit, speech-frequency acoustic tuning, and safe output constraints — was designed to attack that cost and access barrier without compromising on safety or clinical credibility 1. The validation strategy reflects Arish's research instincts: partner with leading institutions (Harvard, McMaster, Hamilton Health Sciences, St. Joseph's), generate structured outcome data, and use that evidence to build trust with audiology clinics and ENT practices as early adopters.
He also serves as Associate Editor at the Journal of Open Source Software, a peer-reviewed academic journal covering open-source research tools — a role that reflects his belief in making scientific infrastructure as accessible as his medical hardware 1.
When Amano was accepted into Founders Inc in April 2026, Arish announced it publicly: "Amano is on a mission to make hearing care accessible to everyone, everywhere, from the world's most affordable hearing aid to research collaborations with leading institutions worldwide. Can't wait to connect with the Founders Inc. community in person next week." 3