Andy Herron‑Newell

I'm a CTO and Chief AI Officer with a track record of turning technology into measurable commercial value. I've scaled engineering organisations from founding team to 70+ engineers, led AI‑first platform transformations across clinical trials, telehealth, and digital health, and supported four funding rounds and two successful exits.

My most recent operating role was CTO at TRI — Triumph Research Intelligence — where I spent 14 months building regulated RBQM software for clinical trials sponsors and CROs. That work gave me a direct and specific view of where data management friction lives in the trial lifecycle: the manual configuration burden, the site‑level data entry problem, and the gap between where the pain is felt and where procurement decisions are made.

My work sits at the intersection of deep technical leadership and business strategy — building the governance frameworks, regulatory compliance, and AI capabilities that PE/VC‑backed companies need to scale with confidence. I currently advise a portfolio of stealth‑mode startups across HealthTech, BioPharma, and AI, while pursuing my next senior leadership opportunity.

I believe technical credibility isn't something a CTO can delegate. Not because CTOs should be writing production code, they shouldn't, but because the decisions that matter most require you to have genuinely wrestled with the technology, not just read about it.

In practice, that means I spend time every week experimenting with emerging tools and building proof-of-concepts — evaluating AI development environments, prototyping RAG pipelines, exploring agentic workflows, or stress-testing a new architectural approach before committing engineering resources to it.

This isn't about staying busy technically. It's about being able to walk into an architecture conversation, a board presentation, or a vendor negotiation and speak from direct experience rather than secondhand reports.

It also means my engineering teams know I understand the constraints they're working within. That trust changes the quality of every conversation.