Ahmed Abdulaal

Ahmed Abdulaal
Occupation	Co-founder and CEO of Mecha Health
Known for	Mecha Health (YC W25)
Education	Imperial College London (medical training), University College London (PhD, Machine Learning)

Ahmed Abdulaal is a British-based physician, machine learning researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mecha Health, a health technology company that develops foundation models to automate X-ray analysis for radiologists. Mecha Health was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 batch.

Early life and education

Abdulaal completed his medical training at Imperial College London. He subsequently pursued doctoral studies in machine learning at University College London as a Microsoft PhD Scholar. His academic research has spanned causal modelling, structural models, medical imaging, and generative models, with publications at venues including ICLR (2024, 2025) and NeurIPS (2022 workshop). Notable research includes work on causal graph discovery, deep structural causal modelling of Alzheimer's disease, and methods for mitigating hallucinations in large language models.

Career

Prior to founding Mecha Health, Abdulaal worked as a research scientist at the Center for Artificial Intelligence at AstraZeneca. He also contributed to published research on COVID-19 outcomes, including a study investigating the association between ethnicity and health outcomes in SARS-CoV-2 patients in a London secondary care population.

Abdulaal co-founded Mecha Health, which is based in San Francisco. The company builds proprietary foundation models that process medical images and produce draft medical reports for radiologists. According to the company, its first model was developed in less than two months and outperformed models from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI on clinical accuracy metrics, while being significantly smaller in size and trained on less data. The system is designed to enable radiologists to increase their throughput from reading one scan per hour to one scan every five minutes.

Mecha Health raised $4.1 million in seed funding, led by Valia Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Reach Capital, and Phosphor Capital. The company has partnered with what it describes as the largest privately owned radiology practice in the United States and a multinational tele-radiology company. The system accepts medical imaging data in DICOM, HL7, and FHIR formats and generates editable draft reports.

The company operates in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and health technology sectors.