What You Should Know:
– Cleerly, a New York City-based company launched today with $43M in Series B funding and unveiled its first-of-its-kind digital care pathway solution for heart attack prevention. The Series B funding, which was led by Vensana Capital with participation from LRVHealth, New Leaf Venture Partners, DigiTx Partners, the American College of Cardiology, Cigna Ventures, and existing investors, brings Cleerly’s total funding to $54M.
– Using more than a decade of research started at Cornell medical school and New York Presbyterian Hospital to develop this solution and train the artificial intelligence that powers it, Cleerly provides a new standard of care for identifying heart disease and serving each and every stakeholder in the care pathway.
– With its Series B funding, Cleerly will scale its commercial reach, expand operational capabilities and strategic partnerships, and continue to grow its focus on industry-leading research and development. As part of the financing, Justin Klein of Vensana Capital, Tripp Peake of LRVHealth and Vijay Lathi of New Leaf Venture Partners will join Cleerly’s Board of Directors
Creating a New Standard of Care for Heart Disease
Cleerly was founded based on more than a decade of foundational research its team used to develop the proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms that power its revolutionary capabilities. This research was conducted in The Dalio Institute for Cardiovascular Imaging at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine and evolved into the Cleerly technologies. The research includes large-scale clinical trials with more than 50,000 patients, comprising the most extensive body of coronary imaging research to study how imaging can be used to better understand heart disease and project patient outcomes. Cleerly was founded in 2017 to translate this advanced imaging science into the company’s pioneering approach for identifying people at risk of heart attacks.
Cleerly’s digital care pathway leverages non-invasive coronary computed tomography (CT) angiography to perform comprehensive coronary artery phenotyping through AI-enabled and FDA-cleared solutions. This technology is based on millions of annotated lab images used to build more than two dozen proprietary algorithms capable of quantifying and characterizing the presence, extent, severity and type of coronary artery disease and other cardiovascular disorders.
Through this new visibility and understanding of coronary artery disease, Cleerly is transforming the field of cardiovascular medicine by introducing a multidimensional approach to serve each and every stakeholder in the care pathway – from imaging physicians, to clinicians, to patients, to payers.
For example, beyond end-to-end AI for deep coronary phenotyping, Cleerly’s solutions include tools for clinicians – such as primary care physicians or general cardiologists – to understand the importance of the data without having to understand advanced imaging. It also includes interactive and personalized, patient-facing tools to help improve health literacy and empower patients with knowledge. Finally, quantitative tools enable patients and their care team to track coronary artery disease changes over time.
“Advanced imaging has been key to diagnosing and preventing the most common causes of cancer for years, but we’re not using it yet to prevent the most common cause of death. We use 3D mammograms, colonoscopies and lung CT scans to find and prevent breast, colon and lung cancer, but we haven’t had similar capabilities for the world’s number one killer – heart disease,” said James K. Min, MD FACC, and founder and CEO of Cleerly. “Through the application of artificial intelligence that is constantly being refined with our unprecedented volume of accruing and exclusive clinical data, Cleerly is finally bringing heart disease diagnosis and prevention into the twenty-first century.”
