Anna-Katrina Shedletsky

CEO & Co-Founder Instrumental Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the CEO and co-founder of Instrumental, a manufacturing AI and data platform she launched in February 2015 with Samuel Weiss, a fellow Apple engineer. The company exists because of a specific and expensive problem she lived through at Apple: when a new product goes into mass production, defects appear that nobody anticipated, and finding them requires engineers physically present on the line in Asia, inspecting units by eye and reasoning backwards from failures. Shedletsky spent more than 300 days in China doing exactly that, having designed mechanical components for three iPods and led system product design for the first Apple Watch. Instrumental automates the discovery: cameras capture every unit at every station, and machine learning finds the anomalies that humans would eventually notice, weeks earlier.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Instrumental in February 2015 with Samuel Weiss and leads it as CEO.
• Raised a $50 million Series C.
• Deployed the company’s systems at major contract manufacturers including Foxconn and Flex.
• Led system product design for the Apple Watch Series 1 and designed mechanical components for three iPod generations.
• Spent over 300 days in China on production lines during six years at Apple.
• Named a 2019 Top Woman in Cloud by CloudNOW, and received the Design Automation Conference’s Under 40 Innovators award.
• Founded the Women in STEM Mentorship Program in 2013, matching hundreds of women students with industry mentors.

Professional Journey

Shedletsky took two degrees in mechanical engineering at Stanford University before joining Apple, where she spent six years in product design. She designed mechanical components across three generations of iPod and led system product design for the Apple Watch Series 1 — a first-generation product in an entirely new category, which is the hardest kind of hardware to bring to production because none of the manufacturing processes are established.

That work took her to China for more than 300 days across her time at Apple. The job on the ground is essentially forensic: units come off the line with problems nobody predicted, and engineers must work out which of hundreds of process variables caused them, usually by inspecting failed units and hunting backwards. The information needed to diagnose the problem existed, but only fleetingly — on the line, in physical units that moved on and were never systematically recorded.

She founded Instrumental in February 2015 with Samuel Weiss around that observation. The system installs cameras at assembly stations to capture images of every unit at every step, builds a searchable record of how each individual unit was actually built, and applies machine learning to detect anomalies as they emerge rather than after they have become failures. For an engineer in California, it means being able to inspect a unit built in Shenzhen that morning without boarding a plane — which during the pandemic became not merely convenient but the only option available.

The systems were deployed at major contract manufacturers including Foxconn and Flex, and the company raised a $50 million Series C. Shedletsky has been named a Top Woman in Cloud by CloudNOW and received the Design Automation Conference’s Under 40 Innovators award, and writes as a Forbes contributor.

Separately from the company, she founded the Women in STEM Mentorship Program in 2013, which has matched hundreds of women studying STEM subjects at university with practising industry mentors.

Education

Stanford University

MS, Mechanical Engineering

Stanford University

BS, Mechanical Engineering