Shelden Shi

Technical founder focused on applied voice AI: Shelden co‑founded Lilac Labs (YC S24) and serves as CTO, building "Lilac Voice" — a production-focused conversational voice agent designed to automate drive‑thru order-taking for QSRs. The company emphasizes integration with existing POS and comms systems and claims high accuracy and low latency engineering tradeoffs required for real-world deployment. ycombinator+2

Engineering and ML background from UC Berkeley: Shelden studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science (computational neuroscience) at UC Berkeley and did ML-focused research there, which informs his product/engineering approach to building voice and audio models. nocap+1

Product and startup experience across health and fintech stacks: prior roles reported include software engineering at Flatiron Health and a founding/founding-engineer role at Symbolic, indicating experience building backend systems, ML pipelines, and product features in regulated/production contexts before moving into full-time founding. substack+1

Public code and hands‑on speech work: Shelden maintains a GitHub profile with repositories and forks related to speech recognition and conversational speech models, showing practical familiarity with open-source speech tooling and experimentation. github