Ramin Syed

Ramin Syed is the hardware and mechanical engineering lead at Amano, the Founders Inc–backed startup building ultra-low-cost 3D-printed hearing aids. A Mechanical Engineering student at McMaster University — where he holds the Engineering Award of Excellence and is on the Dean's Honour List — Ramin brings the hands-on design and fabrication expertise that turns Amano's machine learning and acoustic research into physical devices. He is the third member of the founding team alongside Arish Shahab and Aaron Yu ¹.

Mechanical Engineering at McMaster

Ramin is pursuing a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University, one of Canada's strongest engineering programs. His academic standing — Engineering Award of Excellence and Dean's Honour List — places him among the top performers in the program ¹.

The iBiomed founders (Arish and Aaron) and the Mechanical Engineering founder (Ramin) represent a deliberate division of founding competencies at Amano: biomedical research and ML on one side, and physical fabrication and mechanical systems design on the other. Hearing aids require both, and the combination maps cleanly onto the team's structure.

MiON Forest: Autonomous Drone Systems

Alongside his work at Amano, Ramin holds a concurrent mechanical engineering internship at MiON Forest, a Hamilton-based company designing autonomous drone systems for environmental applications. His specific project involves designing autonomous drone dropper systems — the mechanical subsystems that enable a drone to carry and release payloads (seeds, sensors, or materials) at precise locations ¹.

The work is directly relevant to his role at Amano: autonomous dropper systems require the same combination of mechanical precision, repeatability, and constraint-aware design that 3D-printed medical devices demand. In both contexts, the goal is a mechanism that behaves predictably under real-world variation — whether that's wind variation for a drone or anatomical variation in an ear canal for a hearing aid.

Amity Global Foundation

Since August 2023, Ramin has served as Fundraising Manager for Amity Global Foundation, a Mississauga-based nonprofit. In that role, he has secured more than $50,000 in funding while managing teams and executing major events ¹. This experience is directly transferable to Amano's fundraising needs as the company moves through Founders Inc and toward its first institutional raise.

Role at Amano: Founding Engineer

Ramin joined Amano as Co-Founder and Founding Engineer in September 2025. His role is focused on the physical product: designing and iterating on the 3D-printed housing, working on the acoustic structure of the device, and translating the team's ML-based sizing model into manufacturable geometry ¹.

The 3D-printing approach Amano uses is central to the company's cost thesis: by printing device housings locally rather than ordering from a contract manufacturer, the per-device cost drops to a fraction of commercial hearing aids. It also enables faster iteration, since a design change can go from a CAD model to a physical prototype in hours. That speed is especially valuable during the clinical pilot phase, when feedback from audiologists and patients may require rapid mechanical adjustments ³.

San Francisco and Founders Inc

When Amano was accepted into Founders Inc in April 2026, Ramin traveled to San Francisco along with Arish and Aaron as the full founding team. Aaron's public announcement named all three co-founders heading to SF — the first time the complete founding group appeared together in a public-facing statement ³.

For the Amano team, the move to San Francisco marks the end of its initial R&D phase and the start of its first structured clinical pilots. That transition is fundamentally a manufacturing and reliability problem: a prototype that works in the lab needs to become a device that holds up across a population of users with different ear geometries, different wearing habits, and different acoustic environments. Closing that gap is Ramin's central challenge — and the one that most cleanly separates Amano from the longer list of AI and software startups also arriving in the Bay Area this summer.

References

1. Ramin Syed LinkedIn Profile(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
2. Arish Shahab Founders Inc acceptance post(accessed Apr 22, 2026)
3. Aaron Yu post on Amano at Founders Inc(accessed Apr 22, 2026)