In September 2024, Feifei Duan and her teammates left our AI + Global Health hack with first place and gold hoodies. This spring, she was back building with a team working on robotic cell culture. Now she’s co-founder and CEO of Shepherd Robotics, part of Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch.
Different problems, different teams, and a growing body of work. Here’s a look at what she’s been building.
A health hack win with MindMeadow
At the 24-hour AI + Global Health hack in San Francisco, Feifei teamed up with Dexter Tan and Suveen Ellawela to build MindMeadow, a prototype assistant for people with dementia.
The team explored how visual and audio inputs could help someone recognize faces, follow conversations, and recall context during everyday interactions. Their demo took first place.
The September 2024 recap captures the setting: builders formed teams on the spot at Studio 45 and had a day to turn an idea into something they could show.
Feifei and her teammates at the AI + Global Health hack in San Francisco.
Back at the workcell with Culture Shock
In spring 2026, Feifei joined Culture Shock at the AI Science Cell Cultivation Hack at Monomer Bio. Her teammates were Dale Herzog, Grace Lee, Rachel Lee, Betool Mohsen, Jaee Shah, and Zac Builta.
Their question was how to make cell culture automation adapt to experimental results. A robot can execute a protocol, but someone still has to interpret the data and decide what to try next.
Culture Shock proposed a loop connecting experimental design, execution on Monomer’s robotic workcell, and AI analysis powered by Elnora. The aim was to use each round of results to refine the next set of media conditions, reducing the manual work between experiments.
Robotics experience behind the builds
Feifei’s background includes professional robotics work. Her YC founder profile describes training large transformer models at Waymo and deploying robotic systems into large food factories at Chef Robotics.
That experience spans both learning systems and the work of getting machines to operate in physical environments. Shepherd is taking on another setting where that combination matters.
Launching Shepherd Robotics
Feifei co-founded Shepherd with David Fang and Kai Ru. The company is building robots for skilled physical work in data centers and advanced manufacturing.
In its YC launch, the team describes starting with commissioning and inspection in data centers, along with electrical assembly tasks such as routing wires and inserting terminals. People supervise the robots and handle exceptions, with those interventions helping improve the systems over time.
For our community, it’s exciting to see someone return to build across healthcare and lab automation, then launch a company tackling skilled physical work. Congratulations to Feifei and the Shepherd team on YC and the launch. We’re looking forward to seeing what you build next.
Watch the team’s launch video for a closer look at its work.