Anima

Anima is a healthcare technology company building what it describes as a next generation care enablement platform. The product brings together the tools care teams need to resolve their caseloads quickly and safely, with the stated ambition of becoming an operating system for healthcare and life sciences. Anima’s platform is used by clinical teams to take information-complete medical histories, automate patient communications and clinical notes, and support front and back office work in medical practices.

The company’s founding insight, as described by its CEO and co-founder Shun, came from clinical frustration: patients were dying or suffering avoidable harm not because medical knowledge or clinicians were lacking, but because information moved poorly and fragmented teams and data turned solvable problems into tragedy. Anima was founded to change how care information and decisions are routed. Its stated mission is human wellbeing, and the company believes personalised medicine will transform it, with a system that learns continuously from care and its outcomes as the path toward that goal.

Anima builds toward this through a proprietary active learning architecture, which the company calls Anima 2.0, and says it holds one of the biggest, highest quality labelled datasets in the world. The company has described a 2021 patent application related to sparse mixture-of-experts and active learning loops. Its AI, named Annie, handles a large percentage of documents autonomously, according to the company, and Anima says its software can take a medical history as good as or better than a typical human doctor.

Anima is a Y Combinator W21 company. It raised $2.5M before Demo Day in four days, led by Hummingbird, and in early 2024 closed an oversubscribed $12M Series A led by Molten Ventures. The company reports being cash flow positive and growing rapidly, having gone from $0 to $1m ARR within six months of its April 2022 launch. It has integrated with major UK electronic health record systems including EMIS and SystmOne, and says its clinics look after 3 million lives, serving more than 25% of the UK population across 1,000+ clinics and multiple product lines.

Anima’s customers are primarily primary care and clinical teams in the UK, with a growing implementation function dedicated to onboarding GP practices. The company says it onboarded 131 practices in a single quarter and was building a dedicated implementation team to support that growth. Its product lines extend across care enablement, patient communications and clinical documentation, and the company intends to expand into new areas at the edge of healthcare reinforcement learning and agentic AI.

The company describes a distinctive hacker culture with a flat, “knights of the round table” structure and first-principles thinking. Almost everyone is technical and can code, and there are no separate product and engineering teams: clinical engineers who are also doctors work alongside software engineers. Anima reports zero line managers, PMs or EMs, with a heavy focus on coaching and teaching instead of management. Information is shared transparently across the team on Notion, including meetings, decisions, successes and failures, and a live dashboard shows MRR linked to Stripe invoices.

Anima says it hires candidates from all over the world, offers flexibility over work schedule and location, and maintains remote hubs in EU West and North America alongside a London office in Farringdon. The team gathers for at least two full-team off-sites each year, with past destinations including Brittany, La Paz, Tuscany, the Dominican Republic and Mykonos. The company states that everyone is welcome and that it strongly believes in building a diverse and inclusive team.