Adam Heunis · Chief Technology Officer · Board Advisor
20+ years building, scaling, and modernizing software businesses in regulated industries — life sciences, clinical research, and financial services. Trusted by CEOs, PE sponsors, and boards to make technology the reason a company grows, scales, and exits well.
About
I'm an enterprise technology executive who operates at the intersection of board strategy and technology execution. My career has been spent in the hardest rooms software gets built in — regulated life sciences, live clinical trials, and financial services — where reliability, compliance, and auditability aren't features, they're the license to operate.
What I actually do: I prepare companies to scale and exit. That means modernizing platforms, strengthening regulatory posture (GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA), building high-performing engineering organizations, and aligning the technology roadmap with the capital strategy — so that technology increases enterprise value instead of consuming it.
I've done this from every seat: PE-backed CTO, co-founder, engineering executive inside an S&P 500 acquirer, seller-side diligence lead through an acquisition, and founder of my own firm serving global brands. Equally effective presenting to a board and debugging an architecture — and I believe a CTO should be both.
Selected Results
As CTO of a PE-backed life-sciences platform, partner with the sponsor and board on a value-creation thesis tracking to ~100% year-over-year ARR growth — anchored by a ~90% reduction in the platform's central performance metric. Anchor customers include 2 of the world's top 5 pharmaceutical companies.
Inside an S&P 500 healthcare enterprise, secured a $15M investment and led the technical direction of a complete cloud-native, event-driven platform rewrite built for regulatory auditability. The platform supported 60%+ of the top-50 BioPharma sponsors running FDA trials — including trials under Operation Warp Speed.
Owned the technical workstream through a company acquisition: pre-close due diligence, direct engagement with the acquirer's diligence team and executive leadership, then post-close platform and engineering integration through the change of ownership.
Co-founded an AI-powered platform in the capital-markets space alongside a serial founder with a prior successful exit. Built the end-to-end technology stack and AI capability from the ground up while shaping the narrative for investors and capital allocators.
Founding contributor to the working group that defined interoperability standards adopted across the UK financial services and insurance industry — standards still in sector-wide use.
Founded and ran a software services firm for seven years, delivering enterprise systems for household-name global brands across consumer goods, automotive, electronics, and telecommunications — including the largest non-US digital campaign of its era.
What I Do
PE sponsor engagement, technical due diligence (buy- and sell-side), value-creation planning, quarterly board reporting, and exit preparation. I make the technology story legible — and credible — to capital.
I've sat on both sides of the table: seller-side diligence lead through a successful acquisition, and buy-side diligence and post-close integration planning today. From data room to Day-100 plan.
Cloud adoption and migration, SaaS modernization, digitization and automation, AI-driven workforce productivity, and the organizational redesign that makes it stick.
GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, HIPAA, validated software lifecycle, audit readiness. I build platforms that pass the audit and the architecture review.
Enterprise AI/LLM adoption, modern data platform and lakehouse architecture, and governance frameworks — grounded in commercial outcomes, not hype.
Building and leading multi-site engineering, product, and data organizations across the US, EMEA, and offshore delivery centers — including a ~100-person fully remote org.
Experience
A career in four chapters. The full chronology lives in the resume — available on request.
2025 — Present
Chief Technology Officer of a growth-stage, PE-backed software company serving the regulated life-sciences market. I lead the company's largest function, sit on the executive team, and partner directly with the board and sponsor on growth strategy, M&A, and the value-creation plan. The job in one sentence: make sure the technology underwrites the investment thesis.
2023 — 2025
Co-founded an AI venture in the capital-markets space and built its technology from nothing. A compressed, intense education in how investors allocate capital and how companies get positioned for it — perspective I now use on the other side of the boardroom table every day.
2016 — 2023
Nearly a decade leading engineering at clinical-trial software companies — first steering a business through its acquisition from the seller's side, then as engineering executive inside an S&P 500 enterprise running a ~$150M ARR platform. Global teams, validated software, live clinical trials, national-priority programs, and the discipline of operating where downtime is measured in patient impact.
1992 — 2016
Two decades and three continents of building: developer and architect in South Africa and the UK, consultant to £20B public-sector and financial-services institutions, founding contributor to national industry standards, principal architect in regulated SaaS — and seven years running my own firm serving global brands. This is where the conviction formed that technology leadership is a craft you earn at the whiteboard first.
Appointed member of a major cloud provider's technology council · Founding contributor to the UK financial-services interoperability standards body
Contact
Whether you're a CEO looking for a technology partner, a PE sponsor who needs diligence you can trust, or a board planning what's next — I'd like to hear about it.