A catheter that can feel the difference between blood, a clot, and the wall of your artery - and gives the blood back while it works.
A logo, a webp file, a $115 million company. Menlo Park, California: two founders who have started this kind of thing five times before decided pulmonary embolism deserved a better tool, and then spent six years quietly building one.
Pulmonary embolism is a boring name for a terrifying event. A clot, usually formed somewhere in the legs, breaks loose, travels north, and lodges in the arteries of the lungs. The heart, suddenly pushing against a wall, starts to fail. It is one of the more common ways cardiovascular disease kills people, and for a long time the tools for pulling the clot back out were, to put it charitably, blunt instruments.
Inquis Medical, a company in Menlo Park, sells a less blunt instrument. It is called the AVENTUS Precision Thrombectomy System, and its central conceit is a good one: the catheter can sense what it is touching. Blood, clot, or vessel wall - the device gives the physician real-time feedback, a feature the company brands TrueClot. If you have ever wondered how much of interventional medicine is done by feel and educated guessing inside a blood vessel you cannot see, the answer is: more than you would like. AVENTUS is a bet that the tool should supply the answer instead of the operator's intuition.
There is a category of medical device company that exists to make an existing procedure marginally less bad, and there is a smaller category that tries to redesign the procedure around a single stubborn problem. Inquis, founded in 2020, is the second kind. Its stated philosophy - "improve the system, improve the outcome" - reads like a platitude until you look at what the system actually does.
Consider blood loss. Mechanical thrombectomy, the act of physically hauling a clot out of a vessel, tends to remove a fair amount of the patient's blood along with the clot. Hospitals plan around this; sometimes they transfuse. AVENTUS includes what the company calls a Clot Management System, which reinfuses the patient's own blood during the procedure. It is autologous, meaning your blood goes back into you. This is not a flashy feature. It is the kind of unglamorous engineering that a founding team obsessed with the whole procedure, rather than a single heroic moment of it, tends to produce.
Then there is the sensing. The TrueClot technology gives the operator a running read on whether the catheter tip is against flowing blood, a clot, or the vessel wall. In a field where a wrong move can perforate an artery, telling the physician what they are touching is genuinely useful. It is also the sort of thing that is easy to describe and hard to build, which is a decent description of most of what Inquis does.
The company ran a pivotal trial - 130 patients with intermediate-risk pulmonary embolism, more than 20 sites across the United States, single-arm, prospective. The results were the kind that make regulators comfortable. The primary safety performance goal allowed for a 25% rate of device-related major adverse events at 48 hours. AVENTUS reported zero. On efficacy, patients showed a mean 0.47 reduction in the ratio of right-ventricle to left-ventricle size - a standard proxy for how hard the heart is straining - within 48 hours. The results were presented as a late-breaker at the 2025 SCAI meeting and published in the society's journal, JSCAI.
The economics matter too, because devices that are merely good medicine do not always get adopted. AVENTUS reported a mean ICU stay of 0.8 days, with 68.9% of patients out of intensive care in under 24 hours. Shorter ICU stays are the sort of number a patient feels and a hospital's finance department notices. Inquis has built a product that is plausibly good for both, which is the whole game in medtech adoption.
In June 2025 the FDA granted 510(k) clearance for AVENTUS to treat pulmonary embolism, expanding on an earlier clearance for the peripheral vasculature. In January 2026 the company closed a $75 million Series C from an undisclosed strategic investor, bringing total funding to roughly $115 million. The money, the company says, is for scaling commercial adoption nationwide and funding a next-generation pipeline. Which is to say: they have proven the device works and now have to convince a lot of hospitals to buy it.
"Care without compromise - because every minute and every drop counts."Inquis Medical company tagline
Inquis is run by Vahid and Mojgan Saadat, a married pair of serial medical device entrepreneurs who serve as co-CEOs. Between them they have started and run companies together for more than two decades - which is either a sign of unusual conviction or unusual stubbornness, and in medtech those are often the same thing.
A serial medical device entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience. Previously founded or co-founded Arrinex, Voyage Medical, Baxano, USGI, and AngioTrax - a long track record of building companies around unmet clinical needs.
An experienced startup entrepreneur who co-founded Arrinex and CogniTX and served as a partner at Nidus Medical. Co-leads Inquis alongside Vahid, bringing operating and venture-building experience to the company.
The core device for removing clot burden in pulmonary embolism and deep vein thrombosis, built around proprietary TrueClot tissue sensing for real-time feedback distinguishing blood, clot, and vessel wall.
An access sheath engineered to minimize blood loss during the insertion of endovascular devices - part of the company's whole-procedure approach to blood conservation.
An autologous reinfusion system that returns a patient's own blood during the thrombectomy procedure, reducing the blood loss that typically accompanies mechanical clot removal.
Source: AVENTUS pivotal trial, n=130 intermediate-risk PE patients, published in JSCAI (2025). Bar widths are illustrative.
| Round | Amount | Date | Selected investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series C | $75M | Jan 2026 | Undisclosed strategic investor |
| Earlier rounds | ~$40M | 2020–2025 | Versant Ventures, Marshall Wace, ShangBay Capital, Yu Star, EnPointe Ventures |
| Total to date | $115M | — | — |
Vahid and Mojgan Saadat launch Inquis Medical in Menlo Park to build better tools for venous thromboembolic disease.
The company enrolls 130 intermediate-risk pulmonary embolism patients across 20+ U.S. sites in its pivotal IDE trial.
AVENTUS meets its primary safety and efficacy endpoints, results are published in JSCAI, and the system wins FDA 510(k) clearance for pulmonary embolism.
Inquis closes a $75 million Series C, bringing total funding to $115M to expand nationwide adoption of AVENTUS.