Navid Aghasadeghi is Co-Founder of Shiraz AI, a Y Combinator-backed robotics startup building robots that learn new manufacturing tasks from a single human demonstration video.

Navid earned a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and went on to become a Senior Robotics Engineer at Rethink Robotics and later Boston Dynamics, where he was part of the core team that commercialized Spot and led manipulation projects.

With over a decade of hands-on experience shipping real robots, Navid brings deep expertise in control theory, machine learning, and dynamical systems, with 10 published papers and over 400 academic citations to his name.

Together with co-founder Mojtaba Mozaffar, Navid and his team combine 20+ years of robotics experience from Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics, and Shiraz AI has already deployed robots to its first manufacturing customers.

Shiraz AI is part of the Y Combinator S26 cohort and targets high-mix manufacturing, where production lines change too frequently for traditional rigid automation, delivering a full stack of hardware, foundation model, and on-site deployment.