Cleerly, a New York startup aiming to transform cardiac care, raised $223 million in Series C funding in July, in a round co-led by T. Rowe Price and Fidelity. With CEO James Min at the helm, the five-year-old firm has been built on path-breaking research at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine —institutions in which he held key positions.
Min has been at the cutting edge of research and authored more than 500 peer-reviewed manuscripts. He served as a professor of radiology and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and was director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging at New York-Presbyterian before taking the entrepreneurial path. His mission at Cleerly is to replace angiogram — considered a gold standard for diagnosing cardiac issues — with non-invasive coronary (CT) angiography and other advanced digital tools, many of which have been approved by the FDA.
In an interview with Citybizlist CEO Edwin Warfield, Min spoke about Cleerly’s vision of establishing preventive cardiac care, the importance of digital tools in advancing treatment and ensuring better outcomes, and the challenges of moving from academia to business.
Pushing Digital Frontiers
In developing digital tools, Cleerly, for example, measures atherosclerosis —build-up of plaque in the heart’s arteries —using scans, rather than relying on symptoms or risk factors. It is why it sets prevention, rather than treatment, as a desirable goal. Cleerly also uses a dozen algorithms built on AI and machine learning technologies to analyze the scans. The algorithms can quantify presence, extent, severity, and type of cardiac and cardiovascular disorders, paving the way for personalized treatment.
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Besides FDA’s approval, Cleerly’s AI and other digital tools have been validated in a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The company also runs more than a dozen clinical trials, including an ambitious plan for an international registry that will enroll more than 100,000 patients over the next decade, making it the largest cardiovascular phenotype outcomes study.
Marquee Investors
Cleerly’s Series C round was co-led by T. Rowe Price and Fidelity. New investors in the round included Sands Capital, Piper Sandler’s Merchant Banking and Heartland Healthcare Capital funds, Mirae Asset Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel, Breyer Capital and Novartis.
