Caristo Diagnostics

With a mission to back bold, breakthrough ideas in life sciences and deep tech, our Early Stage team first partnered with Caristo Diagnostics in 2020. To date, Caristo has raised over £33 million, with investors including BGF, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, Longwall Ventures, and the Oxford Technology & Innovation Fund.

Why we invested

Cardiovascular disease (CVD), including heart attacks and strokes, remains the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for millions of deaths each year, and placing a substantial and growing burden on healthcare systems.

Caristo was founded in 2018 by cardiologists at the University of Oxford, following a decade of scientific research and technical development.

When we first met the Caristo team, what stood out was their focus on a troubling clinical observation: around 80% of patients undergoing CT scans, after presenting with chest pain, are classified as ‘low risk’, yet they go on to suffer twice as many (fatal and non-fatal) cardiac events. Something important was being missed.

For many years, invasive coronary angiography was the only option to assess risk of developing heart attacks through direct anatomical visualisation. For everyone else, medicine relied on population-level statistics and probability (a family history of the disease, for instance).

Non-invasive imaging techniques have matured significantly, over the past decade. Cardiac computed tomography angiography (CCTA) is now a standard first-line test for patients presenting to hospital with chest pain, and is increasingly used for people deemed at elevated risk, based on clinical assessment. But routine interpretation of this imaging misses a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Routine analysis of CCTA scans focuses primarily on visible plaque and arterial narrowing. This reinforces a largely reactive model of care, in which intervention follows symptoms or major adverse events, rather than enabling genuinely proactive and personalised prevention.

Caristo’s founders believed that the missing signal lay not just in the artery itself, but in the surrounding tissue. Inflammation is a fundamental driver of coronary plaque build-up and vessel narrowing. While invisible to the human eye on standard scans, coronary inflammation causes changes in fat tissue composition surrounding the arteries, which leaves measurable signatures. These inflammatory signals are increasingly understood to be a powerful indicator of future cardiovascular risk.

Caristo has developed a proprietary imaging biomarker that quantifies coronary inflammation from routine CCTA scans, capturing disease activity, not just anatomy.

Clinical studies have consistently supported this approach, showing that inflammation-based risk stratification can identify high-risk patients who would otherwise be missed by conventional analysis. And they do so using imaging that’s already embedded in clinical workflows.

Importantly, Caristo is entering a market that is now structurally ready. Earlier pioneers, such as Heartflow and Cleerly, have helped establish the clinical and commercial viability of advanced CCTA analysis. They’ve paved the way for reimbursement, and educated clinicians on the value of moving beyond simple stenosis. While their focus has been different (physiology and plaque, respectively), they have validated the broader category and reduced adoption risk for the next wave of innovation.

Caristo builds on this foundation, extending the paradigm from anatomical and functional assessment to biological risk itself.

The company’s early commercial work, including customer engagement around plaque and workflow integration, has already demonstrated the team’s ability to operate in real clinical environments (not just publish compelling science).

We invested in Caristo because we believe it addresses a fundamental gap in cardiovascular care: the ability to identify who is truly at risk, before they become a patient.

The combination of deep scientific insight, robust clinical validation, and favourable market timing gives us conviction that Caristo can play a defining role in the shift from reactive treatment to preventative cardiology, and become a standard component of cardiovascular care. We’re proud to be supporting the team with funding and ongoing support.