Elucid

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Founder: Andrew Buckler
Founding: 2013
Mission: Provide comprehensive and accurate clinical insights, based on ground-truth histology and machine learning, enabling unprecedented precision healthcare for cardiovascular disease
Employees: 60 & 2/3 Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $50M Raised
Investors: Biovision Ventures, Bold Brain Ventures, Checkmate Capital, MedTex Ventures, IAG Capital, and BlueStone Venture Partners
Key Customers: Amarin, Medical University of South Carolina, University of Maryland Medical System, National Institutes of Health, & Takeda
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $100M – $300M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the $27M Q2 ‘22 Series B
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Elucid offers software to aid in “cardiovascular disease diagnosis and prevention.” Founded in 2013 (commercially) by Andrew Buckler, they’re shining light on a better way to treat and prevent cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in pretty much every developed country and leads to 17M deaths worldwide. Every year.

Andrew was working for large imaging companies like Siemens, Hewlett Packard and most recently Philips to build better imaging systems for doctors. Andrew’s research team was making leap after leap in the technology we can use to better see what’s going on inside of patients. The doctors were then using this new imagery and went “this is great. I can see my preparation more clearly. Let’s operate!”

Cardiovascular treatment, you see, is mainly happening after there’s an event. The standard of care to diagnose cardiovascular disease properly is to put a patient through a procedure. That’s expensive and, well, surgical. The Elucid team is trying to bridge the gap. Is there a way to get the proper information ahead of time to doctors in order to get patients treatment and even help avoid heart attacks & strokes? Maybe software can help save us. 

Andrew dreamed up a nascent concept in 2008 to help replicate what would happen during an invasive surgery. Generating funding grants from institutions like the NIH, the team diligently worked away at the clinical research needed to get its first product off the ground and eventual FDA clearance. Blake Richards joined in 2019 as CEO after 10 years of research to help commercialize the technology.

Elucid is building artificial intelligence software to help physicians diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease noninvasively. Their imagery algorithms help identify the blockages in arteries that are most likely to cause a medical event that cannot be seen visually by the human eye, guiding physicians and care. Its AI-powered imaging analysis software is designed to deeply understand the root cause of cardiovascular disease. Elucid’s plaque analysis software uses AI to analyze medical images of the heart to identify and characterize the plaque in your arteries that might be limiting blood flow. Elucid’s patented PlaqueIQ technology is the only analysis software approved in the United States and Europe, that objectively quantifies the form and structure of plaque validated against tens of thousands of tissue samples.

Elucid’s target customer is a clinical cardiologist (provider) and the insurance companies (payers) see a lot of obvious value in better predictive & preventive type treatment. They are working with large health systems and groups of cardiologists to build up their distribution to a critical mass.

The market Elucid is going after is today in the billions but growing significantly. Elucid is in an exciting transitional phase from being an engineering led research organization to a more well rounded scaled commercial organization. Their 2022 Series B fundraise is helping them make progress toward hiring out a full set of organizational functions. They’re growing revenues over 100% y/y and are ramping up to deliver escape velocity type scale working with dozens of customers that represent some of the largest health systems in the country. The team is hybrid, with more than 60% of the company working locally in the Boston area and visiting the office a couple times per week. 

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Elucid team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • Could you share some details around the key challenges for 2023?
  • What is the long term vision for the company? What is the competitive landscape?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 50 employees?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most additional resources?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Elucid you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team save lives and help our beating hearts. All patients applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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