Ketryx Corp., a startup that offers connected application lifecycle management software that’s tailor-made for the life sciences and medical industries, said today it has closed on a $14 million early-stage round of funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers MIT E14 Fund and Ubiquity Ventures, bringing the startup’s total amount raised to date to $18 million.

Like most other industries today, the healthcare sector has become reliant on rapid software development, and it has had an enormous beneficial impact on patient outcomes. However, software development takes place at such speed that much of the new code created by the industry is buggy. What’s more, the code is becoming increasingly complex at a time when life sciences firms are looking to explore the potential of artificial intelligence-based applications.

Considering the especially complex regulations that healthcare companies must adhere to, it’s no surprise that software development is becoming a significant challenge for the industry to keep up with. In particular, software quality assurance has become an “inhuman task,” the startup says. It has traditionally always been done manually, but given the potential for harm if medical applications are vulnerable to risks, the industry desperately needs a more efficient solution.

Ketryx says it has come up with the answer, using software to automate the quality assurance and regulatory process for medical software applications, so risks can clearly be identified and mitigated before new code is shipped into production.

The startup boasts that it has built a team of experts who possess in-depth knowledge of software development, life sciences regulation and AI and machine learning. Its team members include former employees of Wolfram Research, one of the largest AI-powered knowledge engines in the world, as well as the biotechnology and drug development company Amgen Inc.

According to Ketryx, its Connected Lifecycle Management platform has been built around U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations and quality standards. It is used to automate many of the manual tasks and processes associated with software development and quality assurance, and is customized for the healthcare industry.

Ketryx founder and Chief Executive Erez Kaminski said the company’s mission is to ensure medical software is safe and reliable. “This is becoming paramount as software and AI rapidly permeate the healthcare industry,” he said.

Using its platform, software teams can now automate tasks around documentation, process enforcement and traceability, supporting the use of modern developer tools and DevOps practices. Ketryx said it acts as a single source of truth, improving quality assurance and compliance by enforcing industry best practices across connected systems.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Ketryx’s application lifecycle management software is especially useful now that AI is coming of age. “AI has the potential to accelerate medical research and drug development, but it needs to be 100% reliable,” he said. “When software is faulty in healthcare, very bad things can happen and in the worst case people can get hurt. So it’s good to see Ketryx focusing on this challenge, and it will be interesting to see the tangible benefits it can provide to healthcare companies.”

The company uses its own software to design and release FDA-compliant and validated updates of its platform every few weeks, in addition to offering the same capabilities to others. It claims its platform is used by some of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world to deliver regular software updates faster for oxygen delivery systems, surgical robotics, imaging diagnostics, clinical analytics and application-based therapeutics, among other applications. In addition, Ketryx uses its own tools to design, build and release FDA-compliant and validated updates of its platform every few weeks.

Looking forward, Ketryx said it will use the funds from today’s round to accelerate product development and enhance its own platform, while expanding the commercial operations side of its business.

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