Blake Richards

Chief operating officer for Elucid, a Boston-based AI startup focused on cardiovascular imaging  

For decades the standard approach to cardiovascular risk assessment has been to wait—wait for symptoms, wait for events, wait for a patient to reach the threshold where intervention becomes unavoidable. Elucid is building the technology to change that, and Blake Richards is building the company that delivers it. 

Blake, 36, oversees the company’s product roadmap, finance, medical affairs, clinical partnerships and market access strategy. Elucid’s core contribution to cardiovascular care is developing and supplying non-invasive arterial plaque analysis software. The company’s FDA-cleared platform helps cardiologists and radiologists detect high-risk coronary artery plaque—the underlying cause of most heart attacks and strokes—before a cardiac event occurs. 

In 2023, Richards navigated an $80 million Series C funding round during one of the most challenging periods for AI and medtech investment in recent memory. That capital helped drive Elucid from investigational to FDA-cleared and funded the commercial expansion that has made the company’s plaque analysis technology accessible to more than 70% of insured Americans through CMS and private-payer reimbursement agreements.  

Prior to joining Elucid, Blake gained executive experience across EHR privacy development, life sciences consulting and CEO roles at multiple imaging and AI medtech startups. 

Blake Richards represents a generation of cardiovascular leaders who understand that clinical innovation requires operational infrastructure—and that the path from promising technology to widespread patient benefit runs directly through reimbursement, regulatory strategy and organizational execution.