Dr Yeshwanth Pulijala

Dr Yeshwanth Pulijala is a South Indian-heritage surgeon, researcher, and entrepreneur whose career has bridged clinical medicine and advanced technology. His academic background in medical visualisation gave him a unique vantage point on the surgical environment — not just as a clinician but as a technologist who could see where digital systems were failing to support the operating theatre and the complex supply chains that feed it.

During his PhD research, Yesh witnessed firsthand how the mismanagement of surgical instruments — missing tools, incorrect trays, tracking failures — could create near misses and critical errors in patient care. He recognised that the existing approaches to surgical instrument management — barcodes, RFID tags, and manual validation — were fundamentally inadequate for the precision requirements of modern surgery, and that computer vision offered a path to a genuinely better solution.

In 2017, Yesh co-founded Scalpel AI alongside Dr Shahnawaz Ahmed, a specialist in computer vision and object detection. Together, they built a platform that generates a digital twin for every surgical instrument and tracks it across the entire supply chain — from vendor warehouse to sterile processing to the operating room and back. The system verifies tray contents before they reach the theatre, eliminating the human error that costs healthcare systems millions in delayed procedures, lost instruments, and patient risk.

Under Yesh's leadership as CEO, Scalpel AI has grown to serve major medical device companies, third-party logistics providers, and hospital sterile services departments internationally. The company demonstrated a reduction in supply chain errors and handling time of over 80% in commercial deployments, and in October 2024 closed a £3.8 million round led by Mercia Ventures. Scalpel AI's vision is to become the global standard for connected surgical intelligence.