In the late 19th century, as the second industrial revolution took hold, America had a serious problem: how to strike a balance between innovation and human health and safety. Newspapers were littered with advertisements for miracle cures with dubious origins. At best, these quack products wouldn’t harm those seeking relief, but they were often debilitating or fatal to those who were desperate enough to try them.
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 established a regulatory framework – a set of rules participants in the market had to play by. And in doing so, showed that regulation can have a positive impact on society by increasing safety and trust in innovation in health, food and other critical sectors. Even though at times regulations can be maddening and imperfect, we operate with a fundamental faith that market participants are following the rules set out for them.
As software becomes more intrinsic to society, there will be regulation it has to adhere to, especially where it impacts human health and safety. It is key though, that we enable innovative technology companies to be compliant, without slowing down the pace at which they innovate. That’s why Lightspeed is so excited about Ketryx; their platform is uniquely positioned to help companies around the world develop software faster, while making it safer and keeping it compliant. We’re proud to be leading their Series A.
We are excited about the opportunity given two tail winds:
- Software will have a much larger footprint in regulated industries in medicine, aerospace, automotive etc. And,
- Regulations will be more prevalent as governments continue to establish strong consumer protection programs across industries.
These two factors combined together give the company an existing $10 billion market to sell into, while continuing to take advantage of an expansion in TAM over the next decade.
Today, Ketryx is starting in the field of MedTech, helping life sciences developers build regulated software that has compliance baked into it from the ground up, increasing efficiency and reducing complexity in some of the most critical, lifesaving software on the market. Without Ketryx, developers have to figure out how to address compliance issues from scratch, slowing down development and potentially making the process error prone — which is clearly unacceptable. With the rise of modern developer tooling, and now capabilities such as generative AI, Ketryx has built a modern platform to help developers meet these requirements in a lightweight and automated way.
As software becomes intrinsic to how everything works, from cars to planes to manufacturing, we expect regulation to become more prevalent in these key sectors. Ketryx is in a unique position to expand their platform to these industries with the expertise they are gaining from their MedTech roots.
Indeed, Ketryx Founder Erez Kaminski was inspired to start the company after witnessing this problem up close while at Amgen. Prior to Amgen, Kaminski worked at Wolfram where he saw what the best engineering minds in the world are capable of when unleashed on some of the toughest computational problems that exist. At Amgen, he quickly saw the stark contrast within the MedTech industry and hence set out to change this!
Erez’s diverse set of experiences – from his time in the Army, to working in the Princeton Particle Physics Laboratory, to attending college at Birmingham-Southern so he could play on the football team, give him a broad foundation from which to “tackle” the complexities of building a world-class product to help build regulated software. (And after playing defensive tackle, he later earned a simultaneous MS and MBA from MIT.)
We’re excited to partner with Erez, his Co-Founder Jan Poschko (who led cloud engineering at Wolfram), and the whole Ketryx team on this remarkable and important mission.
Read Erez’s blog post, and Ketryx’s press release. We’d love for you to be a part of Ketryx’s mission.
