Huma raises $80M to turn text into healthcare apps with gen AI

The power of AI is touching all sectors, including the highly regulated space of healthcare. Today, London-based Huma, a health-tech company focusing on advancing digital-first care delivery and research, announced the launch of an AI-powered cloud platform that provides startups with the ability to prototype, launch and scale regulated digital health apps, including those powered with AI smarts, targeting different use cases.

Enterprises using the new Huma Cloud Platform get a variety of tools, but the biggest highlight is a generative AI-powered builder experience that can turn text prompts into ready-to-use applications within minutes.

Huma says the offering is already being used by a handful of startups and large pharmaceutical companies. The company also announced it has closed $80 million in series D funding to further expand the reach of the platform and add more capabilities to it.

“We are here to accelerate the adoption of digital and AI across care and research, and we do that by making the building of digital health solutions for care and research easy. We like to think of Huma Cloud Platform like Shopify but for digital health instead of e-commerce. We believe when digital and AI are scaled, they become affordable for both the poor and the rich. They remain consistent and will help us transition medicine from being reactive to proactive,” Dan Vahdat, founder and CEO of Huma, said in a statement.

Configurable platform healthcare systems

Founded in 2011 under the name Medopad, Huma has evolved into a company focused on providing healthcare organizations and pharma companies with digital-first solutions to accelerate care delivery and medical research. Over the past decade, the company developed a modular, configurable platform that enabled it to develop various healthcare apps, including those for remote patient monitoring, therapy/treatment and decentralized clinical trials.

Vahdat told VentureBeat that using the same core technology for building customer apps not only saved the company from the hassle of building point solutions requiring significant investments (in terms of time and cost) but also eliminated hard-to-navigate, years-long regulatory hurdles. The configurable platform has been cleared by global regulators, including the FDA, which means any app built on top is cleared for use in medical settings.

However, not every healthcare company or startup is willing to hire a dedicated partner for app development. Some want to do it on their own. This is what Huma is trying to address with the new Cloud Platform, which can bring an app to the market in as little as a few days.

Built on the same regulated and configurable technology, Huma Cloud allows organizations to build and launch custom digital health apps using an expansive suite of widgets, modules, templates and disease management tools that can be combined using simple drag-and-drop functionality. The users just have to use these elements with device connectivity capabilities and readily available APIs to bring their projects to life.

More importantly, if the drag-and-drop does not work, there’s also a generative AI-powered builder experience on the platform that puts all the above-mentioned elements into motion using a text prompt for the user. 

For instance, if one needs to create an app for asthma monitoring, they’ll just have to give this prompt and the platform’s underlying algorithms will intelligently put all the required modules and elements together, getting the user started. From there, the user can open the editor to further customize the app elements and functionalities and move towards deployment.

Vahdat did not share which models power this experience but noted that the company has worked with partners like Google to develop a library of models over the years. Users building apps on Huma Cloud can even use this library of models, including those from third parties, to power different care experiences for their end customers.

“We also use generative AI to support clinical teams in efficiently and effectively reviewing patient data. For example, we developed a feature called ‘10x Nurse’, which enables care teams to effectively monitor more patients in less time. The 10x Nurse feature uses GenAI to generate automated summaries of a patient’s health status and build tailored messages to the patient, both of which need to be reviewed by a clinician in detail before being used,” he said. 

Availability to select customers

Since its launch, Huma’s modular platform has powered projects for more than 3,000 hospitals and clinics as well as most of the top 20 pharma companies, engaging over 35 million individuals, with 1.8 million active in over 70 countries. With the launch of the new cloud platform allowing organizations to build apps themselves, the company hopes to scale these figures even further.

“​​One of the key customer segments for the Huma Cloud Platform, aside from the large healthcare and life sciences companies we already serve, are digital health/digitally enabled healthcare startups. We want to support a new generation of entrepreneurs in the digital health space by providing them with the tools in the Huma Cloud Platform and enabling them to prototype, launch, and scale regulated digital health apps to support their companies’ own objectives,” Vahdat noted.

As of now, Huma Cloud is accessible only to a handful of startups and pharma companies, paying either via a subscription-based annual license or a consumption-based pricing mode. However, the CEO says it plans to expand beta access in the coming months by reviewing applications from waitlisted customers.

“Right now we are trialling with selected customers. Huma onboards these customers by training them on the Huma Cloud Platform, after which enterprise users are given administrative/ builder access. Due to the code-free configurability, users are not required to have a tech background. They can develop their solutions through rapid prototyping and testing using QR codes to bring up a live demo version in seconds. Once the final product is aligned, a simple pathway enables enterprise Huma Cloud Platform users to onboard patients and clinicians to the app,” he added.

Part of the funding raised today will go towards the expansion of Huma Cloud, while the other half will go towards adding more capabilities to the platform. This, Vahdat says, will be driven through acquisitions and investments in the digital health space. Overall, the round takes the total capital raised by Huma to over $300 million.

While other solutions, including the recently launched AWS App Studio, also use generative AI to simplify application development, Huma is particularly bullish on its offering as it’s built with a specific focus on healthcare with approvals from global regulators. It will be interesting to see how companies in the healthcare domain will adopt its technology. There have long been concerns around the adoption of AI in healthcare and the startup is vying to address just that.