Huma Gets $80 Million to Build ‘Shopify for Digital Health’

Healthcare AI startup Huma has raised $80 million to develop its new digital health cloud platform.

The platform, announced Tuesday (July 16), is designed to bolster the company’s digital health initiatives while also letting others launch and scale their own products.

“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 said in a news release.

The Series D round brings Huma’s total financing to $300 million. A report by Bloomberg News noted that the company is now valued at close to $1 billion.

Dan Vahdat, the company’s founder and CEO, said in the news release that Huma hopes to speed the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across care and research.

“We like to think of Huma Cloud Platform much like Shopify but for digital health instead of eCommerce,” he 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.”

Huma’s funding comes as the healthcare world continues to debate AI’s place in their field, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

For example, experts say that health chatbots could have a major impact on the sector, but their varying levels of accuracy raise important questions about their potential to bolster or undermine patient care.

“Like other AI-powered tools, medical chatbots are more likely to provide highly accurate answers when thoroughly trained on high-quality, diverse data sets and when user prompts are clear and simple,” Julie McGuire, managing director of the BDO Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation, told PYMNTS.

 “However, when questions are more complicated or unusual, a medical chatbot may provide insufficient or incorrect answers. In some cases, a generative AI-powered medical chatbot could make up a study to justify a medical answer it wants to give.”

In a separate interview, Dr. Michael Gao, co-founder and CEO of SmarterDx, told PYMNTS that clinical AI could help hospitals improve revenue integrity and quality.

By using AI, he said, hospitals can “make sure that their receipts are accurate, that they have everything they should have and they don’t have anything they shouldn’t have.”

He added that 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.”