Huma Secures $80 Million to Develop Shopify for Digital Health

Healthcare AI startup Huma has secured $80 million in funding to develop its new digital health cloud platform. Announced on Tuesday (July 16), this platform aims to enhance Huma’s digital health initiatives and enable others to launch and scale their own products quickly.

“With its Huma Cloud Platform and the regulatory foundation that it is built on, Huma aims to reduce the time it takes to develop and launch digital health projects at scale from years to as little as a few days,” the company stated in a news release.

Details of the Funding Round

The Series D funding round brings Huma’s total financing to $300 million. According to Bloomberg News, the company is now valued at close to $1 billion. Dan Vahdat, Huma’s founder and CEO, expressed that the goal is to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across healthcare and research.

“We like to think of Huma Cloud Platform much like Shopify but for digital health instead of eCommerce,” Vahdat said. “We believe when digital and AI are scaled, they become affordable for both the poor and the rich. This will help us transition medicine from being reactive to proactive.”

The Role of AI in Healthcare

Huma’s funding arrives amid ongoing debates about the role of AI in healthcare. As reported by PYMNTS earlier this year, health chatbots have the potential to significantly impact the sector, although their varying accuracy levels pose important questions about their ability to enhance or hinder patient care.

Julie McGuire, managing director of the BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation, told PYMNTS that AI-powered medical chatbots can provide highly accurate answers when trained on high-quality, diverse data sets and when user prompts are clear. However, more complicated or unusual questions might lead to insufficient or incorrect answers, and there is a risk of AI chatbots fabricating studies to justify their responses.

Perspectives on Clinical AI

Dr. Michael Gao, co-founder and CEO of SmarterDx, shared with PYMNTS that clinical AI can help hospitals improve revenue integrity and quality. By using AI, hospitals can ensure accurate billing and thorough data comparison between clinical care and financial records.

“AI solutions are able to take the data around clinical care and compare it to financial data to make sure that hospitals achieve 100% accuracy on 100% of charts,” Gao said.