Mimicking A Hospital At Home: Huma Brings In $130M Series C

Huma Therapeutics is creating digital “hospitals at home” across different disease areas so that the pharmaceutical and research industries can run decentralized clinical trials.

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“Our mission is to create a world where everyone lives longer and has a fuller life,” Dan Vahdat, founder and CEO of Huma, told Crunchbase News. “By using technology, we can do better research, which enables new treatments to come to market faster through virtual clinical trials.”

To continue to do this, the company, based in London, closed on $130 million in Series C financing co-led by Leaps by Bayer and Hitachi Ventures. The firms were joined by Samsung Next, Sony Innovation Fund, Unilever Ventures and HAT Technology & Innovation Fund, as well as from individual investors, including Nikesh Arora and Michael Diekmann.

In addition, the company received a further commitment of $70 million in equity funding that can be exercised at a later date. It brings the total funding raised to more than $200 million since Huma was founded in 2011, Vahdat said. Goldman Sachs acted as lead placement agent, while HSBC Bank and Nomura acted as joint placement agents.

Huma’s digital hospital at home was co-created with clinicians and independently shown to almost double clinical capacity, reduce hospital readmissions by over a third, and has patient adherence levels of over 90 percent, Vahdat said. The service supports governments’ pandemic responses on a not-for-profit basis and is now used for a range of patients including those going through knee- and hip-replacement surgery.

The company works with four national governments, including England’s NHS, Wales, Germany and United Arab Emirates. The new funding was driven by its plan to go after additional government contracts and 10-year strategic partnerships with clinical research organizations, health care providers, payers, research organizations and technology companies. However, the company didn’t need the money — Huma still had most of its $25 million Series B funding in the bank, Vahdat said.

“We wanted to bring together strategic investors in the areas and geographies where we want to expand,” he said. “We ended up having more interest, but put certain conditions on the $70 million equity for the investors to achieve so that they would help us get where we need to be. For us, we are selective with partners, and it is most important what we can do with the company, but also how their reach can accelerate the impact for patients.”

Over the past few years, Huma grew 3x, Vahdat said. The new investment will be invested in growth in new markets, including the U.S., Asia and the Middle East. In the last year, Huma was able to build a solid team, and plans to double and triple down in this market. It will also work on R&D with technology aimed at collecting patient data in real-time to make it possible for new insights, predictive care and to make sure the right patients are prioritized, he added.

Juergen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer, said in a written statement that Huma’s mission to improve health outcomes will be accelerated by those and future new partnerships.

“Aligned with the vision of Leaps by Bayer, Huma’s expertise and technology will help drive a global paradigm shift towards prevention and care and may boost research efforts using data and digital technology,” Eckhardt added. “We invest into the most disruptive technologies of our time that have the potential to change the world for the better. As an early investor into Huma we know how perfectly the company fits into that frame as one of the leading digital innovators in health care and life sciences.”

Feature photo of Huma’s Dan Vahdat and inset screenshot courtesy of Huma.
Blogroll illustration: Dom Guzman