Cleerly: Aiming For a New Standard in Heart Attack Prevention

Founded in 2017, Cleerly is a healthcare company whose mission is to create digital care pathways to prevent heart attacks. The company is developing a new standard for coronary artery disease by integrating the highest quality clinical science with the latest-generation AI, in order to offer actionable clinical insights to every stakeholder in the heart care pathway. Through these data-driven solutions, Cleerly aims to provide a comprehensive solution for cardiovascular disease evaluation that offers the greatest value to the healthcare system and improves heart health for patients at risk of heart attacks.

Headquartered in New York City, Cleerly is the company creating a new standard of care for heart disease. Through value-based precision diagnostic solutions driven by machine intelligence, Cleerly enables comprehensive phenotyping of coronary artery disease, as determined from advanced non-invasive CT imaging.

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.

The company is led by a world-class clinical and technical team Cleerly enhances health literacy for each and every stakeholder in the coronary care pathway. Cleerly goes beyond traditional measures of heart disease by performing a comprehensive assessment of each coronary artery and branch. Cleerly AI-enabled evaluation of Coronary CT Angiography identifies, characterizes, and quantifies plaque buildup to support physicians in determining a patient's risk of a heart attack and developing a treatment plan to improve heart health.

Cleerly’s technology quantifies and characterizes coronary artery disease (CAD) to help tailor therapies to a patient’s actual disease instead of indirect measures, such as surrogates, symptoms and sequelae of disease as has been done historically.

“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.”

The company secured $43 million in Series B funding and unveiled its first-of-its-kind digital care pathway solution for heart attack prevention. The financing, 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 $54 million.

"Cleerly goes beyond traditional measures of heart disease by performing a comprehensive assessment of each coronary artery and branch."

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.

“We see Cleerly as the future of how coronary artery disease will be evaluated, and we support the company’s mission to tailor a personalized approach to diagnosis, management and treatment, and to validate all of this with world-class clinical evidence of utility and cost-effectiveness” said Justin Klein, MD, JD, Managing Partner at Vensana Capital. “With Cleerly’s industry-leading technology platform and inherent value propositions, we believe Cleerly is ideally positioned to inform a new standard of care for how we manage coronary artery disease at scale.”

Expansion of the Executive Team

Late in September 2021, Cleerly welcomed Brandon Atkinson as Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Nick Nieslanik as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). These strategic executive hires followed Cleerly closing its series B round. The leadership will enable the company to accelerate its work to identify individuals at the earliest stage to prevent heart attacks and save lives with its digital care pathway solution.

While Brandon Atkinson brings 20 years of experience successfully scaling global enterprise technology companies to Cleerly, Nick Nieslanik brings his wealth of experience in building teams, delivering high quality products and developing new technologies that improve people’s lives to the company.

In October, Cleerly also appointed Jim Hartman as Chief Revenue Officer. In his role, Jim will be responsible for driving the company’s revenue-generation strategy and execution, globally. He will lead the sales, payer, customer success and partnership channel teams, and will report to James K. Min, MD FACC, founder and CEO of Cleerly.

James Min, Founder and CEO

"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."