Medical devices & diagnostics · Body composition imaging
Klarismo
A London startup that turned an ordinary MRI scan into a 3D, tissue by tissue map of a person’s own body. It raised roughly $2.1 million within a year of launching, then wound down years before whole body MRI became a mainstream wellness product.
A scan he could not see
“Typically you get the scan done, a radiologist writes two sentences about it, and then prescribes you some treatment basically,” Marcus Foster told TechCrunch in 2015. “You usually don’t get to interact with the data much, even though there’s amazing data about your body.”
Foster had spent eighteen years in tech, most of it as a product manager at Google and then Yahoo. A series of bicycle accidents, and separately a tumor found in his head, put him through repeated CT and MRI scans, and each time he was handed a disc of imaging data he had no real way to explore. In December 2014 he started Klarismo in London with physician Jack Kreindler, to turn an MRI scan a person already has into a 3D model of their own body they can rotate, zoom into, and track over time.
Fat, muscle, and a number for both
Klarismo did not diagnose disease. Its pitch was quantified body composition: visceral fat around a person’s organs, muscle in each limb, a hip to waist ratio compared with the last scan. “We provide non-diagnostic information to people about their own bodies for self exploration and the ability to get a better understanding of their own body,” Foster said in a 2016 interview with Impakter. The company built a machine learning pipeline meant to segment an MRI scan into tissue types automatically, at a scale Foster argued manual radiology review could never reach. “The hypothesis is, if you build a homogeneous dataset of hundreds of thousands or millions of scans, theres gonna be some pretty interesting stuff you can do with that,” he told TechCrunch. “Our approach is, how do we get to big numbers like that? We need to build a consumer product basically.”
“This is focused on your internals; it’s super interesting if you’re an athlete or trying to lose weight or gain weight or build muscle,” Foster said. “We literally can show you every little bit of muscle tissue you’ve built, or fat you’ve lost inside your body, which you couldn’t see any other way.”
Two founders from different worlds
Companies House filings name Marcus Alexander Foster, of German nationality, as Klarismo Limited’s sole registered director. Klarismo’s own website credited Jack Kreindler MD as a co-founder, and Crunchbase lists both Kreindler and Foster as founders. Kreindler, a physician, appeared on the site with a testimonial: “Klarismo has succeeded in creating the world’s first fully automated processing platform for medical images. Finally we can accurately quantify and track segments of the human body such as visceral fat tissue. Klarismo renders the results in a beautiful and consumer-understandable way for self analysis, medical research, and eventually enhancing decision support for clinicians and patients.”
The team also included Brandon Whitcher, described on the site as holding a PhD and CStat: “Klarismo offers end-to-end image analysis that accommodates DICOM data as input and scales with customer demand. We have procedures in place to ensure consistent results by utilizing summary statistics, data analytics and visual inspection of the volumetric data.”
The 2015 raise, and the quiet close
Klarismo launched publicly through Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 batch. TechCrunch reported on July 31, 2015 that the company had raised $2.1 million from Khosla Ventures, Lowercase Capital and Atomico. SEC records back that closely: two Form D notices filed the same week, both July 24, 2015, under Klarismo Inc., a Delaware corporation with its business address listed in London. One reports $19,952 sold to a single investor; the other $2,100,000 sold to four investors, together $2,119,952, within one percent of the press figure.
What came after is harder to pin down. Klarismo Limited, the original UK company, applied to strike off in November 2018 and was formally dissolved on February 5, 2019, per Companies House. PitchBook separately marks the company “Out of Business” as of May 1, 2018, with no document attached to explain the gap. Crunchbase records the same February 2019 closed date. The domain klarismo.com is still registered as of 2026, but now serves only a stack of old marketing images, with no text and no way to book a scan.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| UK incorporation and dissolution | Companies House: Klarismo Limited, company number 09349439, incorporated Dec 10, 2014. Voluntary strike-off application filed Nov 7, 2018; final Gazette notice of dissolution Feb 5, 2019. Sole director throughout: Marcus Alexander Foster, nationality German. | Public record |
| Delaware entity for the US raise | SEC EDGAR: Klarismo Inc., CIK 0001648677, a Delaware corporation formed in 2015 with its business address in London. Used to file both Form D notices and to take part in Y Combinator. | Public record |
| 2015 funding total | Two Form D notices filed Jul 24, 2015, both with a first sale date of Jul 14, 2015: $19,952 sold to 1 investor, and $2,100,000 sold to 4 investors. Combined $2,119,952, closely matching the $2.1 million TechCrunch reported on Jul 31, 2015. | Public record |
| Total funding, as tracked by data vendors | PitchBook lists $2.36 million raised across four separate deal line items: an April 2015 angel check of $141,000, an August 2015 Y Combinator investment of $120,000, an undisclosed September 2015 seed round, and a May 2018 Out of Business marker. Tracxn totals $2.12 million in what it calls a single round. Neither figure exactly matches the SEC total, and neither vendor cites a supporting document. | Differs across trackers |
| Patents | Two US patent applications, US-2018-0192944-A1 and US-2018-0192945-A1, both filed Jan 24, 2017, plus one PCT application, WO-2018132090-A1, filed Jan 10, 2017, covering methods for monitoring and predicting body composition change. PitchBook lists the status of all three as inactive. | Public record |
| Clinical and regulatory record | No FDA 510(k) or PMA listing, no registered clinical trial, no NIH award, and no NSF award tied to Klarismo were found. The five PubMed results returned for a Klarismo search are unrelated papers, on prostate cancer MRI trials and an R software platform, written by different authors. | Not found |
| Date the company stopped operating | Companies House and Crunchbase both give Feb 5, 2019 as the date Klarismo Limited closed. PitchBook’s deal table marks the company Out of Business as of May 1, 2018, about nine months earlier, without a document to reconcile the two dates. | Differs from Companies House |
Read plainly: the money TechCrunch reported in July 2015 lines up almost exactly with the SEC filings from that same month. Harder to pin down is how big Klarismo ultimately got and precisely when it stopped operating: the data vendors disagree with each other, and with the SEC total, by tens of thousands of dollars and by the better part of a year on the closing date. Neither Companies House nor the SEC filings say why.
What to watch
- Whether the patents Klarismo filed in 2017, now marked inactive, were ever picked up by another company.
- Whether Marcus Foster or Jack Kreindler are named in any of the whole body MRI companies, such as Prenuvo, Ezra or Function Health, that built the consumer market Klarismo tried to start a decade earlier.
- Whether klarismo.com, still registered but stripped to a handful of images with no text, is ever reactivated or is allowed to lapse.
- Whether a later or amended SEC filing ever appears under either Klarismo entity to settle the funding total.
In their words
“Typically you get the scan done, a radiologist writes two sentences about it, and then prescribes you some treatment basically.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, TechCrunch, Jul 31, 2015 · Independent
“This is focused on your internals; it’s super interesting if you’re an athlete or trying to lose weight or gain weight or build muscle.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, TechCrunch, Jul 31, 2015 · Independent
“We literally can show you every little bit of muscle tissue you’ve built, or fat you’ve lost inside your body, which you couldn’t see any other way.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, TechCrunch, Jul 31, 2015 · Independent
“The hypothesis is, if you build a homogeneous dataset of hundreds of thousands or millions of scans, theres gonna be some pretty interesting stuff you can do with that.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, TechCrunch, Jul 31, 2015 · Independent
“We provide non-diagnostic information to people about their own bodies for self exploration and the ability to get a better understanding of their own body.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, Impakter, Jul 6, 2016 · Independent
“The name is from the Esperanto word ‘klerismo,’ which means enlightenment.”
Marcus Foster, CEO, Impakter, Jul 6, 2016 · Independent
“Klarismo has succeeded in creating the world’s first fully automated processing platform for medical images. Finally we can accurately quantify and track segments of the human body such as visceral fat tissue.”
Jack Kreindler MD, co-founder, Klarismo company website, 2017 archive · Company-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordCompanies House overview, Klarismo Limited, company 09349439
- Public recordCompanies House filing history, Klarismo Limited, company 09349439
- Public recordForm D, Klarismo Inc., accession 0001648677-15-000001
- Public recordForm D, Klarismo Inc., accession 0001648677-15-000002
- IndependentKlarismo, A Service That Makes A 3D Model Of The Inside Of Your Body, Raises $2.1M
- IndependentKlarismo (YC S15) Uses 3D Scanning To Make A Model Of The Inside Of Your Body
- IndependentKLARISMO: 3D Visualizations of Your Body
- IndependentKlarismo, An MRI Scan Of Your Body Composition
- CompanyKlarismo company website, home page
- Public recordCrunchbase organization profile, Klarismo
- Public recordTracxn company profile, Klarismo
- Public recordPitchBook company profile, Klarismo
- IndependentACR Statement on Screening Total Body MRI
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
