Claryx, a genomic intelligence company, came out of stealth today with $3.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Outlander VC. It’s building an immune system for hospitals, one that catches transmission while it’s happening, shows the infection prevention team where to intervene, and confirms afterward that it stopped.
Claryx was founded by brothers Kurt and Dirk Hackenberger, and it began with their grandmother. In 2004 she went in for a routine procedure, developed C. difficile and then sepsis, turning a few hours into three months in the hospital. No one could tell their family where the infection came from, and over two decades later, most hospitals still can’t.
Her case is far too common. On any given day, roughly 1 in 38 U.S. hospital patients carries an infection they didn’t arrive with, a problem that costs as much as $45 billion a year and is associated with more deaths than breast cancer or car accidents.
Much of that cost falls on the hospitals themselves, which are typically paid a fixed amount per admission, so any infection can quickly cost more than that payment covers, while adding roughly 7.8 days in a bed the next patient is waiting for. Separately, hospitals with high infection rates face Medicare penalties running into the millions a year, all against operating margins near 2%.
The infections themselves aren’t hard to see, but the connections between them are. Nothing tells the infection prevention team an outbreak is underway until case counts climb above a normal baseline, so an outbreak spread across five wards, two patients here and three there, never crosses the line on any of them. The only outbreaks a hospital confirms are the ones that grew big enough to notice. The rest run silently, some for months, and no one ever knows they were there.
Reading a pathogen’s genome is the only way to tell a real transmission chain from chance, and it’s what links scattered cases as one outbreak, points to the likely source (another patient, a shared piece of equipment, a reservoir anywhere in the building) and confirms the response worked. Claryx finds those reservoirs by matching infections against a digital twin of the hospital, built from its air, its water and its surfaces. Running all that continuously has never been affordable. Chemistry Dirk developed during his PhD changed that, cutting the most expensive sequencing step by more than twentyfold, so a hospital running Claryx’s CloneLink platform can stop waiting for an outbreak to become obvious and start looking before anyone knows there’s one to find.
The approach already has peer-reviewed evidence behind it. In a two-year study at UPMC Presbyterian, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, a University of Pittsburgh team ran real-time genomic surveillance and found 172 otherwise undetected outbreaks across 476 patients. 96% of the outbreaks they traced and acted on went no further. The team estimated 62 infections and close to five deaths avoided over the two years, and a 3.2-fold return on the cost of running the program, a figure that excludes the roughly 480 bed-days freed to serve patients who need them.
Dirk earned his PhD in the genomics of infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance under Gerry Wright at McMaster University, with work published in Nature, Nature Communications and Cell Host & Microbe. Kurt spent most of the past decade as an investor, most recently as a Vice President at The Carlyle Group, where he led diligence across more than 350 companies and put over $3 billion behind the ones he believed in. Then he left to build one.
“We believe preventable infections are a solvable problem,” said Kurt Hackenberger, Claryx’s Co-Founder and CEO. “Today we can tell a hospital where an infection came from. We’re building toward a future where it never had to happen in the first place.”
“Every building people share is a transmission system running invisibly, and Claryx has made it possible to finally see it,” said AJ Smith, Partner at Outlander VC. “We backed Kurt and Dirk because once you can generate this kind of intelligence in a hospital, you can generate it anywhere infection spreads.”
Claryx’s scientific advisory board brings together clinicians and researchers from Mayo Clinic, Harvard, Yale, Weill Cornell, Washington University, UCLA and McMaster, alongside former public health leadership from New York City and the CDC. The company is live across multiple health systems today.
The round was led by Outlander, with participation from Company Ventures, Boost VC, Neon, Mana Ventures, 640 Oxford and Precursor.
About Claryx
Claryx is building the hospital immune system. It reads the genomes of confirmed patient infections, links related cases as outbreaks, and traces each to its likely source. When that source is a reservoir in the building, Claryx finds it in a digital twin sequenced from its air, its water and its surfaces, all on proprietary chemistry cheap enough to run continuously. Founded by brothers Kurt and Dirk Hackenberger, Claryx is based in New York and is live across multiple health systems. claryx.com
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