American news magazine TIME recently named Connie Lehman, MD, PhD, Founder and CEO of Clairity, to its 2026 “TIME100 Health List,” which consists of the world’s most influential personalities shaping the rulebook of the healthcare sector, in terms of advancing care, shaping policy, driving innovation, and transforming lives.
Dr. Connie Lehman’s entry into the prestigious list is not surprising at all, given her proactive involvement with leading US health systems to launch “Clairity Breast,” the world’s first AI technology to assess a woman’s five-year risk of developing breast cancer directly from the suspected patient’s routine screening mammogram.
As a first-of-its-kind innovation in the breast cancer domain, Clairity Breast identifies subtle patterns in breast tissue invisible to the human eye that often act as warning signs of cancer’s arrival, enabling clinicians to identify a woman’s risk much earlier.
Dr. Connie Lehman has been a veteran name in the medical fraternity’s response against breast cancer. Apart from serving as Clairity’s Founder and CEO, she has spent decades at Harvard Medical School as a Professor of Radiology, advancing breast cancer detection and prevention.
The medtech company remains focused on advancing cancer risk assessment through artificial intelligence and computer vision, with the ultimate goal of shifting the standard of care from late-stage treatment to proactive, risk-informed prevention.
A Name Redefining The Healthcare Sector
After starting out at Duke University, Connie Lehman proceeded to Yale University, where she completed both her MD and PhD. That combination of clinical medicine and deep research training shaped the direction of her career, giving her the ability to move between patient care and scientific innovation with ease.
Since then, she has become an exemplary name in the field of breast imaging. As a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and a specialist at Mass General Brigham, she spent years focused on improving how breast cancer is detected. She has also published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, apart from becoming a leading voice in areas like breast density research, computer-aided diagnosis, and the game-changing usage of AI in medical imaging.
Her focus area has changed. Knowing the shortfalls of traditional screening methods, which, despite being valuable, mainly detect cancer after it has already formed, Dr. Connie Lehman started asking a different question: what if imaging could actually predict risk before disease develops?
Her research began leaning more heavily into deep learning and AI, exploring patterns in mammograms that human eyes simply can’t detect. That curiosity led her to come up with Clairity, a Boston-based health technology company built around that exact idea. Since its foundation in 2020, the company has placed AI at the core of functions like analysing routine mammograms and estimating a woman’s five-year risk of developing breast cancer.
In November 2025, Clairity raised USD 43 million in Series B funding to commercialise its FDA-authorised AI platform. The round was led by ACE Global Equity and Sante Ventures, with participation from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and new investors. The funding was raised keeping in mind goals like the platform’s commercialisation in the world’s largest economy, forming partnerships with imaging centres and health systems, and the development of “Clairity Breast 3D” and “Clairity Heart” for predicting cardiovascular risk from imaging exams.
Clairity Breast’s task is simple: use routine mammogram images to predict who may be at risk of getting breast cancer over the next five years, followed by earlier intervention, which will ensure fewer late-stage diagnoses.
Since 2025, the company has been rolling out its technology to existing health systems, apart from expanding its pipeline to include AI-based predictive offerings for other diseases using the same deep learning framework. The funding round was also held keeping in mind reimbursement initiatives and partnerships to make Clairity Breast accessible across community imaging centres.