Former Medtronic CEO Joins Ketryx Board

Ketryx, has appointed former Medtronic Chairman/CEO William A. Hawkins to its Board of Directors.

Hawkins, who also participated in Ketryx’s Series B financing, has more than four decades of leadership experience in medical technology and healthcare. As Medtronic’s CEO, he led the medtech behemoth through a period of significant growth and innovation. After retiring from Medtronic in 2011, he helped co-found the Medical Device Innovation Consortium (MDIC), an enterprise attempting to help solve scientific and technical challenges in the medical device industry.

His appointment occurs at a pivotal moment for the medical device and life sciences industries. Organizations are racing to adopt artificial intelligence (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 a perceived 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,” Hawkins said. “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,” Ketryx Founder/CEO Erez Kaminski stated. “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.”

The appointment builds on a year of continued momentum for Ketryx. Earlier this year, 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.

“Technology evolution has brought forward AI that is enabling companies to accelerate the development of new products critical for improving the human condition,” Hawkins commented. “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.”

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% and help teams identify and close compliance gaps, improving both speed and quality across the product lifecycle.