T. Rowe Price Co-Leads $192 Million Series C for Cleerly

Dr. James K. Min

T. Rowe Price and Fidelity on Monday led a $192 million Series C funding round for Cleerly, a New York startup using artificial intelligence and other digital tools for cardiac care.

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.

Existing investors in the round included Vensana Capital, LRVHealth, New Leaf Ventures, Cigna Ventures and DigiTx Partners. Cleerly has so far raised $248 million in venture funding.

Life sciences focus

T. Rowe Price, which has over $1.5 trillion in assets under management, has made over 300 portfolio investments and exited 123. Its most recent investment was in a $119 million Series D funding round for Flexe, a Seattle, Wash.-based company, which has been dubbed “Airbnb of warehousing” for offering on-demand storage space for eCommerce and other firms.

The investing giant’s portfolio investments this year have focused on life sciences and include Senti, Convoy, Sionna Therapeutics, Tessera Therapeutics, Cross River, SandboxAQ, PrognonIQ, RefleXion, Rigetti Computing and Cellink.

Taking tech to heart

Cleerly, founded by Dr. James K. Min in 2017, is built on technology developed by the New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine. It seeks to replace angiogram — the so-called gold standard for diagnosing cardiac issues — with non-invasive coronary (CT) angiography and other advanced digital tools.

For example, Cleerly measures atherosclerosis —build-up of plaque in the heart’s arteries —using scans, rather than relying on symptoms or risk factors. It then 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.

Cleerly’s AI and other digital tools have been approved by the FDA, and also validated in a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The company runs more than a dozen clinical trials, and is laying out 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.

Prior to starting Cleerly, Min was a professor of radiology and medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the Dalio Institute of Cardiovascular Imaging at New York-Presbyterian. He is the author of more than 500 peer-reviewed manuscripts.