Globally, healthcare IT systems are groaning under the weight of legacy platforms. Thankfully, there’s a new wave of startups entering the arena: UK startup Anima is a “care enablement” platform that operates almost like a combination of Slack, Salesforce and Figma, but for healthcare clinics and hospitals.
The company recently raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Molten Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective and Y Combinator, as well as new angel investors including Sidar Sahin, founder of Peak Games.
Anima, a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, launched in September 2022 and is now used in 150 NHS clinics in England. The startup’s software lets clinic staff process and file healthcare documents, but adds in a higher degree of automation compared to legacy systems.
“Anima can take a specific medical history, autonomously, for any presenting complaint, and present this to the clinic with potential differential diagnoses and suggested next steps, ensuring red flags are not missed,” Shun Pang, co-founder and CEO of Anima, told TechCrunch. “The entire clinic collaborates in a real-time multiplayer dashboard, like Figma, and can ping cases to each other, and chat with a Slack-like UX.” he said.
He also added that Anima’s processing system can “autonomously ingest any document, like handwritten, diagrams, imaging, and output a summary, with structured fields.”
Competitors in this space include UK-based accuRx, which is post-Series B and has raised £36.6 million to date. In the U.S., Memora Health has raised $80.5 million, and NexHealth, which is post-Series C, has raised $177.2 million to date.
Pang told me, “We see our real competitors as any company with a credible path to a ‘care enablement’ platform, which captures the clinical workflow from ingestion to resolution, akin to what Rippling did for HR, or Salesforce for distribution.”
He is also somewhat of an unusual founder in this space, as he was a practicing doctor prior to this startup: “I’m doubly technical. I trained as a doctor at Cambridge, and I’m a self-taught software engineer who wrote a lot of the code for Anima. I was essentially building what I myself had wanted, and knew would save lives.”
Given its traction and founder hinterland, Anima has managed to make encouraging inroads into the NHS, which is said to be notoriously tricky to deal with.
Inga Deakin, a principal at Molten Ventures, said in a statement: “Software and artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is a rapidly growing multi-$bn sector, but many solutions take time to integrate and realise their potential… Anima is growing rapidly, because they can directly and immediately have an impact.”
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