Huma raises $80m, launches 'Shopify for digital health'

Huma has raised $80 million in fourth-round financing that will go in part towards rolling out a new platform that can be used by developers to create disease management tools.

The UK digital health company – which develops apps that support patients living with diseases, often in partnership with pharma companies – said the Huma Cloud Platform will do for digital health what Shopify has done for small retailers by making e-commerce easy and accessible.

The Series D was backed by AstraZeneca, HAT SGR, Hitachi Ventures, and Leaps by Bayer, amongs others, and takes the total raised by the company to date north of $300 million.

In a statement, Human said that the time it takes to build and scale a new digital health product could be reduced from "a few years" to just days with the new platform, described as a "no-code" framework that allows developers to create disease management tools using a library of pre-built modules.

It also has features designed to make it easier to link tools with devices like wearables, off-the-shelf application programme interface (API) software, the ability to host and deploy predictive and diagnostic artificial intelligence algorithms, and a marketplace.

As well as being open to other developers, the Huma Cloud Platform will be used to serve the company's existing software-as-a-medical device (SaMD) disease management platform, which was approved by regulators in the US and Europe last year.

The approval was a milestone for the company, meaning that its SaMD apps can n be used to provide clinical advice and recommendations for treatment. Previously they were only authorised to collect data from patients and pass that on to clinicians who would then interpret the results and decide on a care plan.

That regulatory status also means the cost, time, and risks associated with bringing digital health projects to market have been significantly reduced, helping Huma in its efforts to develop disease management apps with half of the pharma industry's top 20 companies, including AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Merck KGaA.

The latter partnership bore its first fruit earlier this year in the UK with the launch of an app to support people with urothelial carcinoma, the most common form of bladder cancer.

"Pharmaceutical companies need financially and technically efficient digital solutions to minimise spending on efforts that are duplicative or can't scale," commented Dr Juergen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer and the pharma group's business, development and licensing operations.

"The Huma Cloud Platform enables companies to streamline how they bring digital medicine, companion apps, and data collection capabilities to patients from the R&D phase to post-launch," he added.