John
Farquhar

In August 2025, John Farquhar stood in Times Square and rang the Nasdaq opening bell. HeartFlow had just priced its IPO at $19 per share and, by close, the stock had surged 66%. The company raised $364 million. At 6 feet 6 inches, Farquhar cut a recognizable figure on that stage. Once he was catching passes from NFL quarterbacks. Now he was catching the attention of Wall Street.

HeartFlow builds AI that reads coronary CT angiography scans and generates a 3D simulation of blood flow through the heart - doing in software what once required an invasive catheterization procedure. The platform, called FFRCT Analysis, has been used on more than 650,000 patients across 1,800 institutions worldwide. It has 625 peer-reviewed publications behind it. And for the last three-plus years, Farquhar has been the one steering the company that built it.

His path to that Nasdaq stage is one of those careers that defies the resume shorthand. An undrafted free agent from Duke who spent five seasons as a tight end in the NFL, Farquhar didn't just pivot when he retired. He pivoted twice - once into consumer goods at General Mills, once into medical devices at Medtronic - before landing at HeartFlow. Each move added a different fluency: how to operate a category at scale, how to run a global commercial team, how to navigate the peculiar world of healthcare reimbursement and FDA clearance. By the time he walked into HeartFlow as COO in August 2021, he had more than 20 years of exactly the operational background the company needed.

Seven months after joining, he was named President. Four months after that, he was CEO. The pace tells you something.

Coronary artery disease is the context. It kills more people globally than any other single cause - roughly 9 million a year by some estimates. The traditional diagnostic pathway involves invasive catheterization, expensive imaging centers, and a clinical decision tree that leans heavily on educated guesswork about lesion severity. HeartFlow replaces guesswork with a physics-based simulation: a computational fluid dynamics model built from a patient's actual CT scan, delivered in the cloud, read by a cardiologist the same day. Farquhar's job is to make that workflow the standard of care.

In February 2025, he stood in front of the company and announced a "bold new vision" - not just to diagnose CAD, but to manage it as a chronic condition. Personalized treatment plans. Ongoing risk stratification. A longitudinal picture of a patient's cardiovascular health rather than a single point-in-time scan. The platform has already received new Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement codes. Cigna has agreed to cover HeartFlow Plaque Analysis. The momentum is real.