He sells the world on machines that look inside the human heart. The latest one fits inside a coronary artery.
A cardiologist threading a catheter into a clogged artery has, for decades, been working half-blind. Ultrasound shows the shape of the vessel. It says nothing about the inflammation simmering inside the wall. R. Scott Jones is selling the fix for that, and it is about a millimeter wide.
Jones is Chairman and CEO of Intravascular Imaging Incorporated, known to almost everyone as i3, a startup in Wilton, Connecticut with a roster you could fit around a small table. The company's product is a 3-French NIRF-IVUS imaging catheter: one slender device that fuses intravascular ultrasound with near-infrared fluorescence. Anatomy and biology, the same pass, the same image. It is the kind of idea that sounds simple right up until you try to build it.
The science did not start in a boardroom. It came out of a collaboration between Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School on one side and the Technical University of Munich on the other, carried by two founders: interventional cardiologist Farouc Jaffer and imaging physicist Vasilis Ntziachristos. What a project like that needs, once the physics works, is someone who has spent a career turning lab results into things a hospital will actually buy. That is the role Jones plays.
He is not the inventor. He is the closer. And the gap between those two jobs is where most medical breakthroughs quietly die.
Coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of death on the planet. Stents are the common repair, and they fail roughly a third of the time, often because they were placed against a wall the operator could not fully read. Geographic miss. Edge dissections. Unhealed struts. The existing tools, IVUS and OCT, are slow and reward expertise that not every cath lab has.
i3's pitch is that you should not have to choose between seeing the structure of the artery and seeing the disease in it. The NIRF channel lights up plaque inflammation. The IVUS channel maps the geometry. Put them in one 3-French catheter and the cardiologist gets both at once, in a device thin enough to go where the trouble is.
In 2022, the company reported favorable tests in ex-vivo human coronary arteries and opened its first equity round to push toward manufacturing and, eventually, the FDA. By LSI USA '25, Jones was on stage presenting the catheter to the medtech investment world. The arc of a startup, compressed into a few public mileposts.
“With these extraordinary early preclinical and ex vivo human results, i3 will raise its first equity round, advance its GMP manufacturing and position its device for a pivotal human study and eventual FDA submission.R. Scott Jones, on the launch of i3's catheter and Series A
Stent procedures are common and life-saving, but a meaningful share underperform - frequently traced to placement and complications the operator could not see clearly. A catheter that reads both structure and disease is a bet on closing that gap.
Figure: approximate share of stent procedures reported to underperform vs. succeed.
Before i3, Jones spent more than two decades in the medical device trade, and a chunk of it inside one of its giants. He led GE Medical Systems' cardiovascular business for the Americas, and again for GE Asia - two very different markets, the same product gospel. Along the way he ran organizations at both ends of the size spectrum, from companies you could count on two hands to one with 7,000 people, and he steered several of them to exits.
That range is the point. A two-person startup and a 7,000-person division fail for opposite reasons, and an executive who has lived in both learns where each one breaks. It is the unglamorous knowledge that makes a founder's invention into a company.
His schooling reads like a passport. A Bachelor of Science from SUNY Plattsburgh. A Master of Arts from Penn State. The International Executive Business Management program at the University of Maryland's campus in Tokyo. Leadership development at GE's famed Crotonville. And, fittingly for a man now commercializing a lab breakthrough, Harvard's Executive Program in Disruptive Innovation - the theory, before the practice came calling.
He studied executive management on the University of Maryland's Tokyo campus - the global market was always part of the training.
The technology he sells crossed an ocean to exist, stitched together from labs in Boston and Munich.
The whole device is a 3-French catheter, roughly a millimeter wide, yet it carries both an ultrasound and a fluorescence sensor.
→The goal is a single-pass view of both the anatomy and the biology of coronary disease - through pivotal human studies and on to FDA submission.The i3 roadmap Jones is steering