Anima Raises $12 million Series A Funding for Innovation

Anima has recently completed a $12 million Series A investment round, with support from investors like Sidar Sahin for Healthcare innovation.

The burden of outdated platforms is causing healthcare IT systems around the world to stutter. The good news is that a slew of new firms are popping up to fill the void. Anima, based in the United Kingdom, is a “care enablement” platform that functions similarly to Salesforce, Slack, and Figma—only it’s tailored to healthcare facilities.

New angel investors, including Peak Games creator Sidar Sahin and current investors Hummingbird Ventures, Amino Collective, and Y Combinator, contributed to the $12 million Series A investment round that the company has completed. Molten Ventures served as the round’s lead investor.

Launched in September 2022, Anima is already utilized in 150 NHS clinics in England. The company was a graduate of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 class. Clinic personnel may now handle and submit healthcare paperwork with the help of the startup’s software, which incorporates a higher level of automation than previous systems.

To make sure no warning signs are overlooked, “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,” co-founder and CEO Shun Pang told the media. “Everyone in the clinic works together in a real-time multiplayer dashboard, similar to Figma. They can share cases and chat with a user experience similar to Slack,” he explained.

Also, he mentioned that Anima’s processing engine has the ability to “autonomously ingest any document, like handwritten, diagrams, or images, and output a summary with structured fields.”

Another company in this field is AccuRx, situated in the UK. They have funded £36.6 million thus far and are post-Series B. Between Series C and now, Memora Health has raised $80.5 million in the US, whereas NexHealth has raised $177.2 million.

Regarding the topic of healthcare, Pang informed 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 was a practicing doctor before starting this startup, which makes him an atypical founder in this space: “I’m doubly technical.” I am a self-taught software engineer who built a lot of the code for Anima, and I trained as a doctor at Cambridge. What I was essentially creating was something I had wished for and believed would be life-saving.

The National Health Service (NHS) is reputedly difficult to work with, but Anima has made promising gains thanks to its popularity and the founder hinterland.

The software and AI healthcare industry is a fast-expanding multi-billion dollar market, but many solutions are slow to integrate and reach their full potential, according to Inga Deakin, a principal at Molten Ventures. Anima is expanding at a rapid pace because of their ability to make a direct and immediate impact.