Anima saves lives every day

Hey! Shun here, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Anima. We’re building an active learning OS for all of healthcare and life sciences towards maximising human wellbeing globally.

My entire life, I’ve been pulling on a thread that’s affected all of us in some way. Millions die every year because their medical problems aren’t treated quickly enough. Hundreds of millions suffer pain, worry and discomfort needlessly because of long waiting times. I trained as a doctor and quit out of frustration at seeing countless cases of people dying because they got misdiagnosed or didn’t get the right care plan. In one devastating incident, the healthcare system had simply forgotten to follow up about abnormal test results.

Pulling the thread led me to the health spending team at HM Treasury, responsible for deploying 100s billions into the NHS - there, I worked on workforce and system reform policy with No.10 and NHS England (most notably on forming statutory ‘integrated care systems’, which was signed into law as part of the Health and Social Care Act). Seeing the problem space at all abstraction levels convinced me that the only way to fix healthcare was to build a ‘Care Enablement’ platform that can automate and abstract away work at the clinic, and 10x doctors. Doing so would also be the path to a superhuman personalised medicine agent that could go well beyond humans, crunching tens of thousands of low level features at genome and transcriptome level.

At Anima, you’ll help us extend the 3 existing product lines we have, that millions of patients use, and build out new ones at the very cutting edge of healthcare reinforcement learning and agentic AI. Your work will save countless lives.

Top 1% growth - we grew 450% in 2024, are cash flow positive and at Series B/C metrics with a team of ~20

I won’t write too much here, because I think the metrics speak for themselves and if we get further along the process, we can always discuss it more. Users love our product. The biggest testament to this is that most of our growth comes from virality and referrals.

As one of the standout companies in YC’s W21 batch, we raised $2.5M before Demo Day in just 4 days, led by Hummingbird. In early 2024, we closed an oversubscribed Series A round of $12M, led by Molten Ventures. We’ve been turning down pre-emptive offers of more capital since 2024.

Anima clinics look after 3 million lives, and every day around 20,000 people get care through Anima, growing fast.

Why you might love working here

Since the beginning, we’ve cultivated a unique hacker culture at Anima with a flat hierarchy. If you look at some of our LinkedIn profiles, you’ll note that the title is often ‘Product at Anima’, which is a more accurate description of what your role will be - it’s much broader than the typical SWE role. We predict that small, killer T-shaped teams will win out over large mediocre ones in the era of agentic AI. We've been purposefully building a 'knights of the round table' where each person has an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy and human impact on saving lives - zero line managers, PMs or EMs, but an intensive focus on coaching and teaching. [In case you’ve seen the show, the best analogy is Firefly and the crew from it. Greatest show ever imo.]

It started with me. I self taught and wrote a lot of the Anima 1.0 code, and Anima’s active learning patent. I run most of the hiring tech chats to this day. I first and foremost see myself as an IC and builder, and still build stuff in my spare time. More than 80% of our product team are VPs, ex-technical founders and former CTOs (we do not have titles internally). We also have domain experts, including full-stack clinical engineers: ex-MDs who left established medical careers to join Anima because they recognised the much higher leverage they’d have here.

Almost everyone in Anima is at least somewhat technical and very UX focused. This makes for a truly flat hierarchy. Internally, people have described it as a hive mind - there is little semantic error because we all deeply understand the problem, engineering, grading for potential features, and trade-offs.

It's reflected in how we operate:

1. With the outlier product talent density at Anima, there's a heavy focus on coaching and teaching, with no need for line management.

   We've been able to make huge strides in the NHS because we all deeply understand the problem, grading tasks based on our engineering expertise, and real life clinical trade-offs. This deep domain knowledge is ultimately how we integrated with the major electronic health records (EMIS and SystmOne) in just 4 months, and grew from $150k to $7m in 20 months and 3 product lines.

2. We're relentlessly resourceful. In 14 months, we built an extremely loved enterprise app that user