Heart disease is the number one killer, but the scary thing is that half of the people who suffer a heart attack do so without any symptoms beforehand. Many people who have a heart attack are even considered low risk, making it a difficult thing to pin down and prevent, even with the right diet and lifestyle. Cleerly wants to stop that by changing how clinicians approach treating heart disease, using precision heart health to more accurately determine risk and develop better treatment plans. Read more about Cleerly’s ambitions and process in the press release below.
Cleerly, the company creating a new standard of care for heart disease, announced that it has closed a Series C financing round of $192 million. This new funding brings the total raised by the fast-growing health care company to $248 million, which includes its Series B round in 2021.
“At Cleerly, we are passionate about our mission to create a new standard of care for heart disease,” said James Min, MD, FACC, FESC, MSCCT, CEO and founder of Cleerly. “We are grateful for this round of financing that will further enable our work and believe it provides a resounding vote of confidence in our vision for the future of cardiovascular care. The status quo for heart health simply isn’t good enough – for patients, providers, or payors – and our proven approach to examining for early signs of heart disease through the build-up of arterial plaque promises to deliver the change we need right now.”
The oversubscribed funding round was led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., and Fidelity Management and Research Company. They are joined by additional investors spanning the health care, pharmaceutical and technology sectors, including Sands Capital, Piper Sandler’s Merchant Banking and Heartland Healthcare Capital funds, Mirae Asset Capital, Peter Thiel, Breyer Capital, and Novartis. Cleerly’s existing investors also participated in the financing and include Vensana Capital, LRVHealth, New Leaf Ventures, Cigna Ventures and DigiTx Partners.
Cleerly’s AI-enabled approach to evaluating coronary computed tomography (CT) angiograms allows physicians to more easily identify, characterize and qualify atherosclerosis (plaque) buildup in the walls of the heart arteries. This information promotes a more accurate understanding of a patient’s risk of heart attack and represents a marked shift from the way that heart disease has been historically assessed using indirect surrogate markers of disease. These surrogates too often fail patients as predictors and miss the majority of patients who will suffer a heart attack. In fact, more than half of all patients who experience a heart attack show no symptoms before their potentially catastrophic event. When patients do present with symptoms of a cardiac event, Cleerly offers support to physicians that improves diagnostic certainty to personalize therapeutic choices that offer clinical benefit and reduce total costs of care.
This funding round will enable Cleerly to expand its team as well as extend its commercial reach to broaden patient and physician access to its comprehensive technology-enabled care pathway across the entire continuum of disease presentation—from early diagnosis of heart disease to ensuring that ongoing treatments are effective for those who have that elevated risk or symptoms. In addition, the company will invest in additional large-scale outcomes research to establish it as the standard of care supporting physicians through personalized evaluation and treatment of heart disease. Cleerly has more than a dozen ongoing multicenter clinical trials, including an international registry enrolling more than 100,000 patients over the next decade – making it the largest cardiovascular phenotype outcomes study ever performed.
The original press release can be found on Cleerly’s website.
