Women in AI Series: Why I Founded Asteri AI

by Julia Samoylenko

Working for over a decade as an enterprise leader in the Life Sciences industry, partnering with an MIT startup, and being named Employee of the Year at the world's largest medical devices company: that's the road that led me here.

I'm proud to be a "woman in AI" with a startup called Asteri, an AI platform serving name-brand global life sciences enterprises. Our platform is used by regulated functions (Clinical Operations, Quality, Regulatory), heads of business units, program leaders, and global HR leaders to orchestrate collaboration between agentic AI and humans.

It started long before Silicon Valley.

The Two Tracks

For nearly 12 years, I was exactly the kind of person large enterprises depended on, and often struggled to retain. There were always two things running in parallel.

The first was personal ambition. I wanted to grow, to lead, to make an impact, and I wasn't content to stay in one lane. Across my tenure at Medtronic, the largest medical device company in the world by revenue, I moved through Corporate Strategy, Operations, Supply Chain Management, Technology, Finance, and Emerging Markets regional divisions: a breadth of experience few professionals achieve inside a single organization.

The second track was something deeper: an obsession with the complexity of enterprise work itself (the processes, the regulatory environment, the way work actually got done) and a relentless drive to do it differently.

Built From the Ground Up, Literally

My time at Medtronic began in supply chain, but I never stayed in one department for long. After I aced an assignment, I'd be moved to another area. Roles were found, or created for me, to do things that hadn't been done before. To build things that didn't yet exist.

Just six months in, on top of my day-to-day responsibilities, I was assigned to lead the development and deployment of a software product using RFID technology, in partnership with an MIT startup, enhancing the visibility and traceability of Medtronic products from channel partners to hospitals.

Finally, my first taste of building something from scratch inside a large enterprise! It set the tone for everything that followed.

Employee of the Year

Management recognized my work with two company awards: Employee of the Year, chosen from thousands in my region, and Best Optimization Program.

I was asked to deploy the platform across EMEA. The job was anything but theoretical: flying to Bratislava to lead a hands-on deployment inside a hospital; visiting distributors in Lebanon to build trust and bring them into the program; navigating emerging markets one relationship, one conversation, one country at a time.

In 2016, Medtronic decided to build the product internally, and I was the natural choice to lead it. I relocated to Minneapolis to scale the platform globally.

What began as a stretch assignment for a new hire became Medtronic's first channel-partner-facing data management platform: a 0-to-1 journey that gave the company real-time inventory visibility across Indirect (Emerging) Markets, ultimately reaching thousands of customers.

I was effectively running a startup inside one of the world's largest MedTech companies: building a product from zero, leading a team of 100, securing over $10M in funding, and navigating the politics of a global enterprise. Those who worked with me then, as now, describe me the same way: someone who executes, and moves mountains to get things done.

In total, my work earned seven company-wide awards, including the 2019 Star of Excellence and the CIO Award for enabling growth.

The Move to Silicon Valley

Eventually, after completing the Stanford LEAD program and becoming a course facilitator at Stanford Graduate School of Business, the pull became undeniable. I moved to Silicon Valley with a clear intention: to build a category-defining company.

I had spent over a decade inside one of the most complex organizations in the world. I knew, intimately, what it felt like to be a talented person trying to grow, and what it felt like to wrestle with the complexity of enterprise work every single day. I wanted to build something that addressed both.

That vision became Asteri AI.

The Evolution of Asteri

Asteri launched as a skill inference and workforce intelligence platform, built to help enterprises unlock the full potential of their people. The product went live in October 2023, first as a pilot, then a multi-year agreement with a MedTech OEM. Life Sciences was always the beachhead: a regulated, complex, high-stakes industry I knew from the inside out.

Then the world shifted. In 2024, the workforce was no longer just about humans. AI agents were becoming a new reality of enterprise work: not a distant concept, but an immediate operational challenge for every organization figuring out how humans and AI would work together.

Asteri adapted.

Today, in 2026, Asteri is an end-to-end Human-AI work orchestration platform for life sciences enterprises, helping them navigate a world where humans and agents work side by side. The need is huge, partly because of how long things take when done by humans alone: it takes 10 to 15 years on average for a "cure" to come to market. Humans need help.

The founding insight remains the same: work inside large, regulated organizations is enormously complex, and the people and systems doing that work deserve better tools.

A Conversation That Changed Everything

In October 2024, at the Unleash conference in Paris, I met one of the brightest minds in the industry: a senior leader at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. It wasn't a sales conversation. It was a genuine exploration of what the Life Sciences world truly needed, and what a platform like Asteri could become.

That conversation planted a seed. By June 2025, Asteri had initiated a formal partnership with one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and in February 2026 it was formalized into a long-term partnership, a milestone that validated both the product and the vision.

What Comes Next

At its heart, Asteri focuses on the very nature of work (how it's structured, executed, and regulated) as the foundation for deciding where and how AI agents get deployed. In an industry where regulatory complexity is not a footnote but a defining constraint, that foundation isn't optional. It's everything.

For the past two years, that focus has defined life at Asteri. Heads down. Building. Largely in stealth: no splashy conferences, no marketing campaigns, no noise. It calls to mind something Sam Altman once said: "You can skip all the parties, all the conferences, all the press, all the tweets. Build a great product and get users and win." That was my life for the last two years. Asteri's product has been shaped by that discipline, and by the real pain points of the customers my team has listened to, learned from, and built alongside.

We built a platform: the very foundation of things. The layer everything else sits on top of. In a market crowded with agents promising to do it all, Asteri is doing something harder and more durable: building the infrastructure that makes Human-AI work in regulated industries actually possible.

Asteri was built for people like me, talented people navigating complexity inside large enterprises today, and for the organizations that need a smarter, more structured foundation to deploy AI in a way that is responsible, regulated, and real. So humans can do the work that is meaningful.

We at Asteri AI have big plans for 2026. More announcements are coming.

We are back.