Shelden Shi

Shelden Shi is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Lilac Labs, a B2B voice artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, California. Launched in the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch, the four-person startup develops automated drive-thru order systems alongside co-founder and former Tesla engineer Tony Kam. Previously, Shi was the founding engineer at Symbolic, leading the technical development of a fintech lending platform with approximately $1 billion in assets under management and 30,000 monthly active users. Before this role, he worked at Flatiron Health building evaluation pipelines and training machine learning models for cancer diagnostics. He studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley, researching machine learning algorithms to predict human emotions using audio data. Shi currently focuses on applying his machine learning and audio analysis expertise to scale enterprise voice automation solutions.