Ketryx is making medical software safe and reliable. They empower software teams building medical applications to create safe, secure, and compliant products.
Recently, Ketryx announced a $39M Series B round of funding led by Transformation Capital, with participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, MIT’s E14 Fund, Ubiquity Ventures, and 53 Stations.
As the first company featured in our ‘Hiring Unlocked’ initiative, we learned a lot about this fast-growing company, along with details on their product, various teams (Sales, Customer Success, and Product), their culture, hiring goals, and more!
Check out a full recording from the event above!
Speakers:
- Erez Kaminski, CEO & Founder
- Mary Brook Delano, Chief Business Officer
- Gabriel Pascualy, Head of Product
- Tim Brodeur, VP of Success & Delivery
Topics Discussed:
- Details about Ketryx and their platform.
- Impact to the medical device industry.
- The challenges the company is addressing.
- Momentum & the latest at Ketryx.
- Open Roles & Targeted Experience.
- Culture & what it’s like to work there.
Video Transcript
We have four amazing speaker. I’m going to have each person introduce themselves. Erez, I’m going to have you go first. Just a quick little intro, but then Tim, Gabriel, and Mary Brooke, in addition to just a quick intro about yourself, I want you to share why you joined the company. Obviously, Erez, you built the company, so that would be kind of weird to have you say that.
Yeah. And I would say Keith, thank you so much for having us on. Erez Kaminsky, Founder, CEO of Ketryx. I’d say that I’m one of people of many people who built the company. I wouldn’t say I built it; I’m a participant.
About Ketryx and the Mission (Erez Kaminsky, CEO & Founder)
What Ketryx is, Ketryx is a way for people all over the world to design, develop, test, and deploy highly regulated medical software and other types of regulated applications to make them more featureful, cheaper, and help them arrive faster at a higher quality. If you think of an app for diabetes management, or a surgical robot, or AI for radiology that can look at an X-ray or a CT scan of your lungs and identify a tumor, all those are live clients we have today, partners that use us to do those types of functions.
For me, it all comes down to family. I have family members who have implantable medical devices. I’ve met a lot of people like them through their community work and advocacy work for patients. Many years ago, I used to lead AI for a large pharmaceutical company called Amgen and felt like I needed to try and do something to accelerate the rate of safe innovation. And that’s really what we’re trying to do here and what we’re trying to find other people to join our journey and do with us: How can you help 100 million patients by the year 2030 get access to better healthcare through automation?
Why They Joined Ketryx: Backgrounds and Roles
Tim Brodeur, VP of Success & Delivery:
- Background: I actually just joined Ketryx three weeks ago, the newest member of the team on this call, based in Boston. I’ve been in healthcare or life sciences technology my entire career. I joined a company like Veeva Systems when the R&D vault was actually a newer technology, so I had front-row seats to seeing what it takes to bring regulated systems to the cloud, which now we’re kind of bringing things into an AI-native world. I had an opportunity there to lead professional services, and also got into customer success. I went to a smaller company called Benchling and helped stand up their customer success practice, and then to Causaly, an AI platform for biomedical researchers.
- Why I Joined: This idea of solving really hard problems, which is the problem in front of us: bringing these regulated solutions to patients faster. It’s hard to do, and I think Ketryx has kind of unlocked an interoperability here which is really interesting. Compound that with the people (the leadership team) and the product—the product is real, it’s delivering impact. The fact that it’s in Boston is critical for me, right? My family’s here, my roots are here, and that was another big draw for me.
Mary Brooke Delano, Chief Business Officer:
- Background: I love the Boston tech scene. I’ve spent about the past 16-17 years in the healthcare and life sciences space. I was working for about a decade at a startup incubator in Seattle. We carved out one of our companies and moved it here to the Boston area, where I led the go-to-market team. Since 2017-2018, I’ve worked at a couple of different SaaS companies in the life sciences space (Norstella, Definitive Healthcare).
- Why I Joined: I recently got the opportunity to join Ketryx. I was really looking to get back to that high-growth, smaller company where I knew I could come in and make an impact and continue to grow. I’ve always found myself at that intersection of innovation and patient outcomes. The fact that Ketryx is a highly innovative company—we’re AI first, which was really exciting—and at the end of the day, it’s about the patients that we’re impacting downstream by helping the teams that we work with move faster and create safer products.
Gabriel Pascualy, Head of Product:
- Background: I studied computer science and started my career as a cyber security researcher at the MITRE Corporation. I went back to school at MIT and during that journey spent time at Amgen, where I ran into a lot of the challenges that our customers face today at Ketryx: how do we take technology and apply it in a regulated space? I joined Ketryx two and a half years ago and am now the Head of Product. The focus of the first two years was helping develop the product and building out the way in which we help our customers understand and evaluate Ketryx.
- Why I Joined: I like to break it down into three different areas:
- The Problem: Something that came up in my work at MITRE and Amgen. It’s pervasive across every regulated industry.
- The Leaders: Erez brought together a group of leaders to solve the problem of delivering regulated software, which is not a problem that could be solved just with a piece of software. You would need to provide a platform which includes services from Tim’s side, communicating the solution from Mary Brooke’s side, and then ultimately the platform itself.
- The Solution: We made the intentional decision to build Ketryx in Ketryx early on—this recursive idea of, “If we’re going to provide a platform to our customers to build regulated software, then maybe we should build regulated software with our own platform.” This has driven a lot of right decisions around the product, particularly around how to use AI and agents to accelerate workflows.
Erez also noted that Gabriel was their first intern and went from intern to Head of Product in two and a half years, managing a large multinational team, which serves as a great example of the potential for rapid career growth at Ketryx.
The Problem Ketryx Solves (Erez & Gabriel)
The story for me starts when I was hired by Amgen to help figure out what is the future of AI in medicine. I found it so difficult in biopharma, medical devices, and life science to build software and AI. We realized that it’s not just software and AI, it’s generally regulated products (hardware, biochemical, manufacturing systems). You need:
- A tool (our platform) that allows you to interconnect other product development tools with an AI-native approach that lets agents and people collaborate together, execute tasks correctly, and generate evidence of that execution correctly.
- A solution framework (a services framework) that delivers an end-to-end solution.
We can provide an end-to-end solution from the first engagement and training, showing them how people do regulated AI/software today, all the way to implementing our platform and helping them accelerate with guidance.
Because our tool is used in a very complicated, safety-critical way, we were the first company that I’m aware of to certify their product, which is not a medical device, as a medical device—a very burdensome thing to do, unless you’ve cracked this completely and actually have a way to do this much faster and cheaper.
It’s a perfect use case for AI. My involvement in AI goes back many years. I used to be a scientist working on a spark plug for a fusion reactor, where we built one of the first applications of using machine learning. The whole transformer revolution happened while I was at Wolf Research.
The core problem is safety at scale. Consider supply chain forecasting models during COVID-19: they didn’t work well (initially not enough masks, then kept predicting normal demand when it had dropped 80%+). Now, AI is going to run everything we do. If we don’t know where the AI is, what it is doing, what is it supposed to do, what’s the risk of that, how are we ever going to unplug it when we realize that it just is not making the right decision?
I’m very proud to say that a certain portion—about 2 or 3% of all FDA approvals that are for AI systems last year were done in Ketryx, and we think that number is going to go rapidly up this year.
Functional Area Deep Dive: Sales, Product, and Success
Keith asked Mary Brooke to outline the sales team, process, and success factors.
Mary Brooke Delano (Sales/Commercial Motion):
- Team Structure: We’ve got about 20 professionals across this team: 10 AEs, five BDRs, and five Solutions Engineers. We are looking to grow this team.
- Market Segments: Our team is segmented by Growth, Mid-Market, and “Megaprize” (Mega Cap and Enterprise).
- Sales Motion:
- Growth/Mid-Market: Fast-moving, more greenfield approaches. Reps are on the phone with probably 15 to 20 customers or prospects any given week.
- Enterprise: More tailored, bespoke, highly consultative sales cycles. We work in a pseudo pod structure: one-to-one-to-one with a BDR, an SE, and an AE.
- Goal: Listening to customers and thinking about how Ketryx would work best for them. Is that just a quick AI lift and the AI agents working with them, or is that a full implementation across their ALM components?
Gabriel Pascualy (Product Management):
- Team Structure: We have three Product Managers and three Design roles (Head of Design and two designers). We also have around 20 to 25 developers. The team is split across our Vienna R&D site and here in Boston.
- Hiring Profiles: We are looking for two main types:
- Someone that has experience with managing a SaaS product, ideally something that incorporates generative AI into workflows, and experience designing and measuring intentional feedback loops.
- Someone that comes from the industry, having built regulated products before and been passionate about process improvements. For these AI use cases, deep knowledge around the problem is almost more important than deep expertise around how to build AI systems.
- Path to PM: The Solutions Engineering team or the Customer Success and Delivery team are great places to land and build experience working with customers and growing into a PM role.
Tim Brodeur (Customer Success and Delivery):
- Role: It’s appropriate for me to go last because Customer Success and Delivery is adaptive to the sales motion and the product; it’s the connective tissue. It’s a nice hybrid, what I call “client solutions.” It’s a Venn diagram of being passionate about the problem you’re solving, having a commercial lens (understanding time-to-value), but also solving the right problem.
- Team Structure: We’re about 20 people right now with various levels of seniority. We have a new grad/associate level where folks right out of college are joining and establishing a career right here. We also have a manager level up to director. People do a lot of different things, from implementation (requirements gathering, configuration, migrations) to project management and value realization.
- Hiring Profiles:
- Associate Level: We’re looking for associates just coming right out of university, usually with a software engineering or technical background as a baseline to grasp the concepts and quickly bring value to customers.
- Manager/Director Level: Folks with more experience delivering in regulated environments, actually working probably with top 20 or top 10 med device/biopharma companies.
- Specialized Roles: Very specific roles within quality assurance and regulatory affairs where we provide consulting services.
- Career Growth: Many of our most successful employees actually started in this area and are now doing a variety of things from product management to quality and pre-sales. People are getting real experience working with both large startups and Fortune 500 companies every single day.
- Core Trait: Looking for people that are chasing impact. If you’re chasing impact, this might be the place for you.
Joining Ketryx Without Industry Experience
Keith asked what advice they have for people who don’t have a life sciences/pharma/healthcare background but are eager to get into that industry.
- Erez: We are open to teaching that. We’re happy to take folks who have the life science background or have a functional background or are fresh grads and teach them these domains. I think there is really only one job in the entire company—life science consulting, regulatory affairs, and quality consulting—that you probably need to have some specific background for.
- Gabriel: Absolutely, there’s room for folks that don’t have the industry background. We’re looking for people that are ambitious, have the horsepower, and are passionate. A lot of the aspects of operating in a regulated environment are things that can be taught.
- Tim: Most of my team actually doesn’t have a life sciences background. They have a tech or engineering background but don’t have that healthcare background, reinforcing that we are absolutely open to teaching that.
Culture, Funding, and Future Plans
Culture (Erez, Gabriel, Tim, Mary Brooke):
- Erez says culture is what happens, not what you want to have. Our core values are: Moving on what matters and Give autonomy and own it.
- We have a culture of people who have urgency and an ability to deliver high quality work, balanced with needing to care for patients, working with good people, and taking care of families.
- Gabriel added that there is a strong focus on collaboration due to the cross-disciplinary nature of the work.
- Tim described it as a product excellence culture, where they orient a lot towards the excellence of their product.
- Mary Brooke emphasized a high sense of urgency and a fast-moving environment.
Series B Funding and Future (Erez Kaminsky):
- Ketryx recently announced a $39 million Series B round of funding from Transformation Capital.
- The idea is to leverage the success we’ve had in life science, particularly medical devices, to help more companies in life science achieve these weekly/daily release cycles and then go do it for any other regulated industry.
- Erez hopes to replace the word “regulated” with “meaningful” because everything that’s really meaningful is regulated (cars, light bulbs, etc.).
- The goal is to scale the capability and help other meaningful companies do that faster.
Gabriel Pascualy (Additional Hiring):
- We are also hiring a Service Designer here in Boston to focus on customer experience mapping and user journey mapping.
- We are also looking for an Associate PM role (someone more junior or who has come from an adjacent role).
- They will look at putting up a job posting for a PM intern as well.
FDA/Regulatory (Erez Kaminsky):
- We fully support the FDA’s mission. Our first US employee was a former FDA official.
- We are totally in the same mindset of how to help public health and help innovation get to market faster.
- Regarding AI hallucinations, Erez stated that it’s what AI does all the time. There are all kinds of ways to get around that, which they address through the interface and the way they generate information. Their product builds validated AI systems and they leverage the concept of zero-lag safety (AI checking things that humans couldn’t).
Mary Brooke Delano (Specific Commercial Hiring):
- Roles: Hiring across all AEs (Growth, Mid-Market, Enterprise), Solutions Engineers and Senior Solutions Engineers, and BDRs.
- Profile: Intellectual curiosity (constant learning), creativity (solving problems), and prioritizing the day/week/month based on what matters for Ketryx and the customers.
Tim Brodeur (Specific Success/Delivery Hiring):
- Roles: Associates (new grads), Manager and Director level Client Operations folks, and specialized roles in Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs consulting.
- Profile: Chasing impact and having that startup hunger (“Can I do something better? Can I do something faster?”).
Final Remarks:
The panelists encouraged attendees to connect on LinkedIn, check out their careers page on their website, and give them a follow.
