Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Waqas Shabir Co-Founder & CRO of Stackyon, which provides edge-deployed face-verified workforce intelligence for high-hazard industries via 56ms verification, real-time certification and permit checks, and unauthorized activity alerts in under 90 seconds.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Stackyon enables healthcare organizations to structure, automate, and evolve clinical and administrative workflows using multimodal AI agents that operate directly within existing systems.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

I was running a boutique software consultancy where we built apps, integrations, and pretty much anything our clients needed. As AI started making real leaps, it became clear that problems once considered nearly impossible were suddenly within reach. Around that time, my co-founders, Bala and Srini, had already begun shaping Stackyon. They brought me on as a co-founder so we could take on the challenge together – moving beyond simple automation and building fully autonomous AI agents to transform manual processes end‑to‑end.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

For every hour a clinician spends with a patient, they often spend two more on administrative work. It’s a major driver of burnout, and the financial impact runs into the billions. We’re on a mission to change that. What gets me excited every day is applying AI to eliminate this burden – so clinicians can focus on care, not paperwork – and helping healthcare organizations achieve both better outcomes and better economics.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Launching a business is never straightforward. The biggest challenge for me was accepting that building a business takes time, patience, and a lot of resilience. There are always easier paths than starting something from scratch, and the only thing that truly carries you through the hard parts is having a real sense of purpose. That mission is what kept me going and helped me push past the early hurdles.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We see ourselves becoming the leading platform for agentic AI in healthcare operations. Our goal is to power autonomous (not automated) workflows – reducing administrative burden at scale and enabling healthcare organizations to operate with far greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

I’ve learned that you can make quick progress alone, but the journey becomes more meaningful and impactful when you build it with others.

Why Florida?

Why Florida? Honestly, why not. The weather is great, the economy is now the fourth‑largest in the country, and the universities keep climbing in the rankings every year. It’s an incredible place to live, build, and grow.