Anima, a next-generation care enablement platform, announced their oversubscribed €11 million Series A, led by Molten Ventures.Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective and Y Combinator also participated in the round, and there is new participation from angels including Sidar Sahin, founder of Peak Games.
This investment marks a significant milestone for Anima, as it seeks to redefine how healthcare teams deliver care through its clinical operating system. Founded in 2021 by Shun Pang (CEO and CTO) and Rachel Mumford (COO), Anima is led by experts with personal experiences with the healthcare system. Anima is highly selective with hiring—over 60 per cent of the team are former VC-backed founders.
Anima launched with its first paying clinics in September 2022, and is now deployed in over 150 NHS clinics in England that provide care to over 1.3 million lives. The company participated in Y Combinator in Winter 2021. This Series A funding will enable Anima to accelerate deployment to tens of millions of patients and healthcare professionals worldwide.
Shun Pang, co-founder and CEO of Anima, commented: “We’re excited to bring Inga of Molten on our journey. From day one, it was clear to us that she shared our vision of care enablement, a thesis Inga and Molten have had for years. I’m deeply grateful for the special crew we have at Anima. This is a passion project – we’re building what we wish we had as doctors and patients. No one is here just to do a job. We all serve a greater purpose – and that’s why ultimately we’ll continue to move mountains.”
Clinics and healthcare professionals are facing severe financial constraints, inefficiencies, and burnout—problems that are especially acute within the NHS but also widespread globally. Anima addresses the crucial issues of access to healthcare; low productivity and the efficacy of patient care plans.
Anima delivers a universal operating system that, for the first time, streamlines care at multiple levels—clinic, network, and region. A patient-facing app allows Anima to supercharge every stage of the care journey. Crucially, Anima enables a swift resolution of 85% of patient inquiries within a day, a vast improvement over the typical 11-14 day timeframe seen with standard practice.
Any authenticated stakeholder can collaborate in seconds in a real-time multiplayer dashboard, with a single source of patient truth, powered by a proprietary deep-learning healthcare engine. High abstraction APIs automate anything from document processing to medical consultations to automated generation of coded clinical notes. Following a product update in December 2023, Anima has already halved the time practices spend on coding, processing and filing documents.
In the coming year, the company will release the next version of the software (Anima 1.5) which will enable unprecedented automation of front- and back-office workloads, and even greater interoperability of the data to support digital integrated care in multiple geographies.
A longer-term vision is Anima 2.0, a high-level abstraction for healthcare and the life sciences powered by Annie, the company’s proprietary AI healthcare system and clinical co-pilot. Anima 2.0 aims to democratise deep phenotyping and personalised medicine across the entire healthcare domain space, augmenting human clinicians with superhuman abilities through multimodal inference of high-resolution longitudinal care journeys. This will not only transform patient outcomes and clinic workflows, but also puts Anima in pole position to unify healthcare and life science pipelines into a single platform.
Inga Deakin, Investor, Molten Ventures added: “Software and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is a rapidly growing multi-$bn sector, but many solutions take time to integrate and realise their potential. A key reason why Anima is growing rapidly, is because they can directly and immediately have an impact: to improve operations and efficiency to benefit patients, healthcare teams and healthcare systems. This team understands the relevant workflows, the needs of patients and healthcare workers, and is building a large, scalable engine for change.”