Simon ARKELL

Simon Arkell is a two-time Olympic pole vaulter for Australia (Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996), Commonwealth Games champion, and the first Australian to clear 19 feet. He has been inducted into the Athletics Hall of Fame for both the State of South Australia and the University of New Mexico, and was named Australian Athlete of the Year in 1993.

Since transitioning out of sport, he has co-founded seven venture-backed technology companies that have collectively raised more than US$100 million, with three acquired to date—most notably Deep Lens, an AI-driven oncology clinical trial matching platform acquired by Paradigm Health in May 2022, alongside earlier exits at Predixion Software and Versifi Technologies. He has been involved in over 70 clinical trials and five FDA approvals across his career.

He is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Ryght AI, the first agentic-AI platform built to automate clinical trial site selection, activation, and enrolment. Ryght has built a digital-twin network of more than 100,000 research sites globally and recently filed a patent for the underlying "digital twins for clinical research sites" technology.

Alongside his work in clinical trials, he is the founder and MC of the Megan's Wings Orange County Gala, which has raised nearly US$1 million in support of Southern California families facing pediatric cancer—a cause that aligns directly with the patient-access mission driving his work in healthcare AI.