Global healthcare AI company Huma Therapeutic Limited has completed a Series D funding round with financing of over $80 million and launched the Huma Cloud Platform, designed to help accelerate the adoption of digital and AI across care and research.
The Huma Cloud Platform is described as “a technology ecosystem designed not only to support the company’s own digital health initiatives, but also to empower others to launch and scale their projects efficiently”. It offers no code configuration of disease management tools for “any therapeutic area”, with features including a library of pre-built modules, the ability to host and deploy AI algorithms and a cloud-agnostic framework for flexible hosting.
Huma’s founder and CEO, Dan Vahdat, comments: “We like to think of Huma Cloud Platform much 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.”
New and existing investors participated in the Series D funding round including AstraZeneca, Hat Technology Fund 4 by HAT SGR, HV Fund by Hitachi Ventures and Leaps by Bayer, bringing Huma’s total investment to over $300 million.
AI: the wider trend
In other news around artificial intelligence in the healthcare space, last week HTN highlighted how a team from the University of Huddersfield is working to develop a secure threat intelligence sharing platform with the aim of helping to protect AI-enabled diagnostic tools from cyber attacks.
We also reported on the news that Leeds Teaching Hospitals partnered with health tech startup Newton’s Tree to deploy an enterprise AI platform across the trust, with the aim of supporting Leeds Teaching Hospitals to “rapidly scale” its ability to evaluate and implement artificial intelligence applications.
Earlier in the month, HTN highlighted how Great Ormond Street Hospital is utilising the use of artificial intelligence to help identify patients at risk of developing a brain disorder such as Parkinson’s, by analysing blood-based biomarkers.
And at the end of June, we covered how Locala, a provider of NHS community healthcare services across West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, plans to procure AI transcribing software with the aim of enhancing efficiency and accuracy of medical transcription services.
On funding
Recent updates around health tech funding include Norfolk and Waveney Acute Hospitals Collaborative securing £88 million in funding for their shared EPR across Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals, James Paget University Hospitals, and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust, following approval of their full business case.
We highlighted Healthtech-1’s announcement of £2.7 million in seed funding, intended to help expand their automation solutions for primary care, aiming to reduce the admin burden and to help “fix” primary care with tech.
HTN also reported how Innovate UK is working with West Yorkshire Combined Authority to offer a share of up to £500,000 for innovation projects, with the funding to support small and micro businesses grow their innovation activities in the health technologies cluster in West Yorkshire.
