Lucentia Seed Round | Investment Link | Webinar Recording | Breakthrough Early Warning for Heart Disease (AI-Native)

Red Bear Ventures Community:

Thanks to those of you who joined the Lucentia webinar earlier today! As a reminder, Lucentia’s ambition is to become the mammogram of the heart: an inexpensive, low-risk, routine screen that catches coronary disease upstream, before symptoms.

Lucentia held the first close of its seed round this week, with an additional $600K signed and EmTech joining lead investor Long Journey Ventures. Lucentia’s second close remains open through October 16. The company also submitted an IRB application at UCSF, one of its six clinical validation sites.

At today’s webinar, Dr. Sahar Jalal, CEO & Founder of Lucentia, shared her founding story and reinforced why we’re excited about this deal: a hard-to-replicate data advantage, a strong hands-on advisory team, and meaningful early validation.

Importantly, Sahar emphasized that the dataset behind Lucentia couldn't have been built by any single discipline. It took five years and $5M of NIH funding at Weill Cornell, and a lab that brought together aerospace and mechanical engineers, AI scientists, radiologists, cardiologists, and pathologists — each solving a piece no one else could. The result is a histopathology-matched coronary dataset that does not exist anywhere else, built with patented methods exclusively licensed to Lucentia. The data itself is hard to replicate. The combined expertise that produced it is even harder.

The webinar recording is here (passcode: RBV2026!) and the investment link at AngelList is here. Those who join the syndicate at the investment link will gain access to an RBV Investment Memorandum which includes our investment rationale and return analysis.

This investment opportunity closes Friday, October 16 at 5PM ET.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Best,

Dan & Gus

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[For reference, our original note from 9/23/26 follows.]

Red Bear Ventures Community:

We are writing with an investment opportunity in Lucentia's $5M seed round, a SAFE with a $20M post-money cap. RBV has been given a $400,000 allocation. The lead investor in this round is Long Journey Ventures. Existing Lucentia investors include Entrepreneurs First, Transpose, the American Heart Association, Cornell Ignite, and MedTech Innovator. The round closes Friday, October 16 at 5PM ET.

Lucentia turns one of the most common heart scans into an early warning system for heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. Roughly half of heart attacks strike people with no prior diagnosis, because the disease stays invisible until it is serious. Lucentia's aim is to become the mammogram of the heart: an accessible way to identify coronary disease earlier, before symptoms emerge.

The problem is a gap between two scans. A calcium (CAC) scan is fast and inexpensive but primarily quantifies calcified plaque, missing the softer, earlier plaque that often triggers heart attacks. A CT angiogram (CCTA) can characterize non-calcified plaque using injected contrast, but it costs more and is typically used selectively when clinically indicated rather than routinely in asymptomatic patients. So the people most in need of early detection, those who feel fine but have silent disease, are not routinely evaluated with CCTA.

Lucentia applies AI to routine CAC scans to derive CCTA-like coronary insights, at a fraction of the cost and time, with no contrast, new hardware, or workflow change. Its edge is a proprietary, exclusive, and hard-to-replicate dataset, built with Cornell-patented methods and exclusively licensed to Lucentia. The company also has its own patent filing on its model architecture. 

Additional detail is in Lucentia's deck. We will host a webinar with Lucentia's Founder and CEO, Dr. Sahar Jalal, on Friday, October 2, at 12:00PM ET, and will circulate the investment link afterward. Sahar trained as an aerospace engineer with a doctorate in fluid dynamics and medical imaging, and moved into cardiac imaging as a postdoctoral researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine. 

The minimum investment is $1,000 and the maximum is $200,000. To join the webinar, simply reply to this email.

We are excited about Lucentia for several reasons:

A hard-to-replicate data advantage.  Most medical AI learns from experts labeling images. Lucentia has something unusual: human coronary CT data matched to physical histopathology ground truth – scans of real heart tissue that can be compared directly with what is seen under the microscope. Built over five years of NIH-funded Weill Cornell research and exclusively licensed to Lucentia, we believe this dataset is the company's core moat and is difficult for larger competitors to reproduce.

A large, underserved market with real tailwinds.  Calcium scans are already performed at scale, and cardiac-CT reimbursement and guidelines have been moving in Lucentia's favor. The company plugs into existing scan volume and targets the large asymptomatic population that is not routinely evaluated with advanced coronary imaging today.

A differentiated position between two categories.  Well-funded companies apply AI to the expensive CCTA: Cleerly (~$385M raised), HeartFlow (public at ~$4B), Elucid (~$185M raised). Others (Nanox, HeartLung) automate calcium scoring on the cheap scan. Lucentia is pursuing the valuable middle ground neither occupies, and its data advantage is what makes that position defensible. Its deployment model is comparatively capital-efficient: Lucentia is a software layer on scans and imaging infrastructure that already exist.

A strong clinical bench.  Lucentia is supported by respected cardiology and cardiac-imaging leaders, including Dr. Marly Van Assen (Co-Director of Emory's cardiothoracic imaging and AI lab, and principal investigator for Lucentia's Emory validation program), Dr. Stamatios Lerakis (Director of the Cardiovascular Imaging Program and CT/CMR Program, Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital), Dr. Hadi Halazun (interventional cardiologist, Weill Cornell), and Dr. Jeff Wessler (cardiologist and CEO of Heartbeat Health).

Meaningful early validation.  Lucentia was selected for MedTech Innovator, the industry’s largest and highly selective medtech accelerator, and named one of eight companies in the American Heart Association Heart & Brain Health track.  The company has built a six-site clinical validation network spanning Emory, UCSF, Mount Sinai, Les Hôpitaux de Chartres, CHU Ambroise Paré, and AP-HP in Paris. It has also signed commercial proof-of-concept agreements with SimonMed Imaging and ProScan Imaging and letters of intent with Raidium and Innovation Health Services.

Illustrative return potential at this valuation. One page showing what LPs could earn across a range of exit values and hold periods. 

Please reply if you would like to join the October 2 webinar to learn more.

Thanks!

Dan and Gus

Red Bear Ventures is an independent organization wholly managed by its Managing Partners. It is neither affiliated with, nor endorsed by, Cornell University.

Red Bear Ventures is a service mark used under license from its owner, Red Bear Angels Management LLC, which operates the angel group, Red Bear Angels. Please see www.RBAngels.com for information.

This email is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Any investment is made solely through AngelList and the definitive documents of the applicable special purpose vehicle, and is available only to verified accredited investors. Private investments of this type are illiquid, highly speculative, and may result in the total loss of capital. Information about the company is provided by the company.