Claryx, a New York genomic intelligence company, came out of stealth on 4 August 2026 with a $3.5m pre-seed round led by Outlander VC.
Company Ventures, Boost VC, Neon, Mana Ventures, 640 Oxford and Precursor Ventures also invested, according to the company's announcement and BetaKit. No valuation was disclosed, and the company did not say how it will spend the money.
“We believe preventable infections are a solvable problem”Kurt Hackenberger, Co-Founder and CEO, Claryx
What Claryx does
Claryx makes CloneLink, a platform that reads the genomes of pathogens from confirmed patient infections, links related cases into outbreaks and traces each one to a likely source. It also builds a digital twin of the hospital from air, water and surface samples to locate environmental reservoirs of infection.
Co-founder and chief executive Kurt Hackenberger told BetaKit that instead of noticing infections after the fact, the platform identifies them upstream. The company says it is live across multiple health systems. BetaKit reported that Claryx was working with two hospitals, had signed a third and was piloting in New York state, so the two accounts of its deployment differ in scale.
The evidence
Claryx cites a two-year study at UPMC Presbyterian, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, in which real-time genomic surveillance found 172 otherwise undetected outbreaks involving 476 patients. Of the outbreaks the team traced and acted on, 96% went no further. The team estimated that 62 infections and close to five deaths were avoided, with a 3.2-fold return on the cost of the programme.
These figures come from the company's announcement and were not independently verified by this site.
Who is behind it
Kurt Hackenberger spent most of the past decade as an investor, most recently as a vice president at The Carlyle Group, where he led diligence on more than 350 companies. His brother Dirk Hackenberger earned a PhD in the genomics of infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance at McMaster University, with work published in Nature, Nature Communications and Cell Host & Microbe. According to the announcement, chemistry he developed cut the most expensive sequencing step by more than twentyfold.
The company traces its origin to the founders' grandmother, who developed a C. difficile infection and then sepsis after a routine procedure in 2004. Its scientific advisory board includes clinicians and researchers from institutions such as Mayo Clinic, Harvard, Yale and Weill Cornell, and former public health leaders from New York City and the CDC.
The brothers are from Ontario. BetaKit reported that they started in the United States because selling into the Canadian government carries a far higher burden. The founding year and headcount were not stated.
Who invested
AJ Smith, a partner at Outlander VC, said that once a hospital can generate this kind of intelligence, the same capability can be applied wherever infection spreads.
Kurt Hackenberger said the company believes preventable infections are a solvable problem.
Company website: claryx.com