Vaidya Surgical

Vaidya Surgical is an early-stage surgical robotics company building autonomous robots for tumor resection, co-founded by Meer Patel and Aydin Turkay, both Johns Hopkins University biomedical engineering alumni.¹ The company participated in the Founders, Inc. [Ship It] program in February and March 2025, presenting at the program's Demo Day on March 21, 2025 at the Fort Mason campus in San Francisco.²⁹ Vaidya Surgical operates from offices on Stanford Avenue in Palo Alto, California and East 33rd Street in Baltimore, Maryland.¹

Technology

Vaidya Surgical's system uses high-precision robotic arms with multi-degree-of-freedom capability designed for tumor resection procedures.¹ The company's AI component is built on a transformer-based architecture intended to provide real-time, context-aware surgical guidance during operations.¹ The system is designed to be modular and scalable, with the goal of integrating into existing surgical workflows rather than replacing them entirely.¹

As of the company's website in April 2026, the prototype had achieved sub-millimeter accuracy in simulated environments, with validation testing completed.¹ The company's stated roadmap includes preclinical testing with live tissue models, clinical validation partnerships with medical institutions, FDA submission preparation, and eventual market launch.¹

The [Ship It] Demo Day Directory describes the company as building "autonomous surgical robots for tumor resection," distinguishing it from the more common surgeon-controlled robotic systems like Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci platform.²

Founders

Both co-founders studied biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, where their work intersected medical device design, AI, and clinical research.³⁴

Meer Patel

Meer Patel holds a B.S. and M.S.E. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins.³ During his undergraduate years, he was a member of the ICPredict design team, a project that developed a deep learning algorithm for non-invasive monitoring of intracranial pressure (ICP) from extracranial waveforms in the ICU.⁶ The ICPredict work was published in Computers in Biology and Medicine in July 2024, with Patel listed as a co-author alongside team lead Shiker Nair and faculty mentors Robert Stevens and Nicholas Durr.¹³⁵ The algorithm achieved a mean average error of plus or minus 2 mmHg, within accepted standards for noninvasive ICP assessment, potentially eliminating the need for a high-risk procedure that requires drilling through the skull.⁶⁵

Before Vaidya Surgical, Patel worked as an AI Engineer at Onix, scaling generative AI solutions to hundreds of thousands of users for Fortune 500 clients.³ He also engineered rapid saliva diagnostics that secured strategic R&D backing from Danaher.¹⁰

After the [Ship It] program, Patel deferred admission to Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School to co-found Prana, an AI primary care platform that was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.³¹⁰ Prana connects to medical records and wearables to detect what the company calls "clinical drift" — subtle declines in health metrics between doctor visits.³

Aydin Turkay

Aydin Turkay graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2023 with a degree in biomedical engineering, concentrating in imaging and instrumentation as well as neuroengineering.⁴ He attended Sewickley Academy in Pennsylvania before Hopkins.⁴

Turkay joined Kubanda Cryotherapy — a JHU-born medical device startup that developed a minimally invasive cryotherapy device for treating tumors in pets — during his first semester at Johns Hopkins.⁷ He worked part-time on the company's in-vitro trials, market research, and business strategy, and continued in a gap year before medical school.⁷ Bailey Surtees, Kubanda's co-founder, recognized Turkay as an intern of the month through the Maryland Technology Internship Program (MTIP).¹²

At Hopkins, Turkay also served as a CBID (Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design) Design Team Leader, where he led a team developing a failsafe to prevent operating room fires.⁴ He was an undergraduate research assistant in the Thakor Lab at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, evaluating prostheses performance using augmented reality.⁴ He also worked with Vasoptic Medical Inc. on assessing post-operative surgical site health as part of the CBID undergraduate design team.⁴ In 2023, Turkay presented research at the JHU DREAMS symposium on "Functional Analysis of Network Dynamics Using Calcium Imaging to Characterize Glia-Enriched Organoids."⁸

Before college, Turkay spent six years on FTC Team 8393 BrainSTEM Robotics as a designer and builder, and did summer research at Carnegie Mellon University assessing dissolvable micro-needles for drug delivery.⁴ He is also listed as a co-founder of FiOR Medical.⁴

At Founders, Inc.

Vaidya Surgical was one of more than 60 teams that participated in Founders, Inc.'s first [Ship It] program, a four-week sprint running February 24 to March 21, 2025.² The program brought builders from around the world to the f.inc campus at Fort Mason in San Francisco, where they worked alongside 100-plus existing portfolio founders and had access to office hours with exited founders on the f.inc team.²

The [Ship It] cohort included a mix of software and hardware companies: RESA AI (AI phone agents), Cheforge (cooking robots), AgentX (no-code AI agents), Nexstera Tech (disaster prevention infrastructure), and Zuko AI (appointment scheduling), among others.² Vaidya Surgical was among the hardware-oriented companies in a cohort that the f.inc team later noted spanned AI agents, physical robotics, and infrastructure tools.²

Patel and Turkay presented at the [Ship It] Demo Day on March 21, 2025.⁹ The presentation was recorded and published on YouTube.⁹ F.inc had allocated $1 million for investments in standout companies from the [Ship It] cohort, with first checks of $100,000 or more available on demo day.²

As of April 2026, Vaidya Surgical does not appear on f.inc's portfolio page, which lists companies that received investment from the fund.¹¹

Name

"Vaidya" is a Sanskrit term meaning "physician" or "healer," used historically in Ayurvedic medicine to denote a medical practitioner. The name connects the company's surgical robotics work to a broader tradition of medical practice.

References

1. Vaidya Surgical — Homepage(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
2. [Ship It] Demo Day Directory — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
3. Prana: An AI primary care doctor in your pocket — Y Combinator(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
4. Aydin Turkay — Technology and Business Development at Kubanda Cryotherapy — The Org(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
5. AI could change the way we measure brain pressure in neurocritical patients — Johns Hopkins Hub