Cleerly raises $106M from Insight Partners for early detection of heart health using AI
Although heart disease is the main cause of death In the United States, a significant portion of people who suffer heart attacks are unaware that they have the underlying condition.
Clearlya cardiovascular imaging startup, hopes to solve this problem. By analyzing CT scans of the heart, the company’s artificial intelligence software aims to identify early-stage coronary artery disease, similar to how mammograms and colonoscopies detect breast and colon cancer.
“The majority of people who will die from heart disease and heart attacks will never have any symptoms,” said cardiologist James Min, who founded Cleerly in 2017. “At some point, we need to start screening the world for heart disease.” “. The company grew out of a clinical program Min founded in 2003 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine.
Cleerly is currently conducting a large, multi-year clinical trial to demonstrate that its screen can detect heart conditions in people without symptoms of disease more accurately than other routine non-invasive methods, such as measuring blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
If the company manages to obtain regulatory authorization to screen large populations, it could be a boon to the company, significantly expanding its market reach and revenue.
Such enormous potential has attracted significant investor interest. On Wednesday, Cleerly announced it had raised a $106 million Series C extension round led by Insight Partners and joined by Battery Ventures. The big capital haul comes just over two years after Cleerly raised $223. million Series C led by T. Rowe Price and Fidelity.
An extension round is when a company sells another part of itself at the price of the previous round. Although extension rounds are often a sign that the startup isn’t growing well (if they were, they would raise a new round at a higher valuation), Scott Barclay, CEO of Insight Partners, said Cleerly’s is growing enough fast. He said that by allowing Insight to join an earlier round, Clearly raises additional capital to fund future growth and multi-site clinical trials.
Min told TechCrunch that while the company didn’t necessarily need additional capital, given that Cleerly’s other backers were healthcare venture capitalists or crossover ventures, she was excited to add Insight Partners, one of the largest investors in enterprise software. , to your capitalization table.
Barclay is confident in Cleerly’s potential. While the company awaits full FDA approval for general cardiac screening, its algorithms have already been approved to diagnose symptomatic patients and, in October, Medicare approved coverage for your plaque analysis test. Plaque buildup is a common cause of heart attacks.
Until recently, patients complaining of chest pains could have been diagnosed with a stress test, which involves monitoring heart function during physical activity, or coronary angiography, an invasive procedure that measures blood flow to the heart with a catheter and x-rays.
Cleerly claims that its AI-powered CT image analysis is less taxing on the body than a stress test or angiography, and by agreeing to pay for the test, health insurers and Medicare appear to agree.
The company’s software has been commercially available for the past four years, and during that period, Cleerly has seen more than 100% compound annual growth, Min said. And the company is poised to continue its growth trajectory now that the Most payers recognize his method of diagnosis for the approximately 15 million people who develop heart problems each year, he added.
Cleerly is not without competition. Other companies working on AI-powered heart plaque image analysis include HeartFlow and Elucid, but given that they all ultimately want to examine the entire population over a certain age, there’s likely room for more than one winner. in this market.
Personal opinion:
“Clearly’s $106 million fundraising to develop AI-powered early heart detection technology is a huge step forward in innovative healthcare. This move could help reduce heart disease rates through early detection, saving lives. If the money is used to scale the technology and make it more accessible, it could revolutionize the way heart health is managed globally.
