Dive Brief:
- HeartFlow, a company that uses artificial intelligence to provide information on coronary artery disease by analyzing CT scans, raised $215 million in a financing round, led by Bain Capital Life Sciences.
- HeartFlow’s products have been cleared by the FDA, and have been used in more than 725 hospital systems.
- The funds will be used to meet demand for current products and for future product launches.
Dive Insight:
HeartFlow was founded in 2010 by Charles Taylor, a former professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Surgery at Stanford University, and Christopher Zarins, former chief of vascular surgery at Stanford University Medical Center. They sought to create image-based modeling to help physicians determine the extent of the blockage and whether it is impacting blood flow for patients with coronary artery disease.
In 2014, the company received De Novo clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for its first product, which is designed to simulate blood flow in the arteries by computing fractional flow reserve values from CT angiography images. The technology is covered by Medicare and most commercial payers, the company said in a statement.
Since then, HeartFlow, which is based in Mountain View, California, has received FDA clearance for other products, including a planner tool to help interventional cardiologists virtually model clinical scenarios, and tools to provide information on plaque and coronary artery anatomy, which it says can help physicians better understand a patient’s artery disease and heart attack risk.
“HeartFlow has built a strong intellectual property portfolio, brought to market the only combined anatomy, physiology, and plaque analysis to help diagnose and treat heart disease, and is now in over 725 hospital systems worldwide with over 180,000 patients served to date,” HeartFlow CEO John Farquhar said in a statement. "The oversubscription of our Series F funding round, particularly in the current market backdrop, is a strong validation of our technology, our team, and the opportunity in front of us.”
The company plans to launch additional cardiovascular products in the future.
