Ketryx, the agentic continuous compliance platform for safety-critical product development, announced today that William A. Hawkins, former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, has joined its Board of Directors.
Hawkins, who also participated in Ketryx's Series B financing, brings more than four decades of leadership experience in medical technology and healthcare. As CEO of Medtronic, he led one of the world's largest medical technology companies through a period of significant growth and innovation, helping expand access to life-changing therapies for millions of patients worldwide. After retiring from Medtronic in 2011, he helped co-found the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC), an enterprise whose mission is to help solve scientific and technical challenges in the medical device industry.
His appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the medical device and life sciences industries. Organizations across the sector are racing to adopt AI across every layer of product development: to help engineers work faster, to power the next generation of software-enabled and AI-driven products, and to reduce the compliance burden that has historically slowed innovation. Yet many are confronting what Hawkins sees as the AI bottleneck: companies want AI everywhere, but lack the infrastructure required to deploy, govern, and scale it safely in highly regulated environments.
“Every life sciences CEO I speak to is trying to understand how to use AI to accelerate safe innovation,” said Hawkins. “Companies want AI throughout development, in compliance workflows, and increasingly inside the products themselves, but most don't have the infrastructure needed to use it safely, and at scale, in a regulated environment. This is one of the most important problems to solve, and it’s the reason I’ve decided to join Ketryx’s board.”
Ketryx helps companies in safety-critical industries, including medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and robotics, accelerate product development by automatically generating compliant documentation, maintaining continuous traceability, and enabling safe and verifiable AI at scale in the tools teams already use. The platform helps organizations to reduce documentation time, strengthen quality processes, and prepare for regulatory submissions without disrupting modern development workflows.
“Bill led the world's largest medical device company, so he understands what change management actually looks like inside regulated organizations, what the CEOs and exec teams we serve are grappling with, and what it takes to deploy infrastructure of this kind at real scale,” said Erez Kaminski, founder and CEO of Ketryx. “His perspective will make Ketryx stronger at the hardest part of our journey: helping life sciences organizations adopt an integrated and agentic approach to product development and compliance."
Hawkins added, “Technology evolution has brought forward AI that is enabling companies to accelerate the development of new products critical for improving the human condition. What impressed me about Ketryx was how they envisioned using AI to build safer products faster. That change will unlock the next decade of medicine, and it runs on infrastructure that didn't exist until now.”
The appointment builds on a year of continued momentum for Ketryx. In 2026, the company surpassed 100 million patients served and reported accelerating demand for validated AI across the life sciences. As software and AI become increasingly central to safety-critical innovation, Ketryx continues to expand its role as the compliance foundation helping regulated teams move faster while improving quality.
About Ketryx
Ketryx transforms the product lifecycle of life sciences teams to deliver safer products, faster. Trusted by four of the world's top five medical device manufacturers, its agentic continuous compliance platform overlays existing tools to automate documentation, create traceability, and accelerate release cycles without disrupting existing workflows. Ketryx AI Agents reduce manual work by up to 90 percent and help teams identify and close compliance gaps, improving both speed and quality across the product lifecycle.
For more information, visit www.ketryx.com.
SOURCE: Ketryx