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 users have said 'seems too good to be true'. Anima can take an information complete medical history as good or better than a typical human doctor, and increasingly automates front and back office in a way that would’ve seemed like science fiction a few years ago - for example, Annie (our AI) now deals with a large percentage of documents completely autonomously without a human in the loop.
3. Anima is a safe haven for free thinkers and we've been careful to build a culture where everyone feels comfortable being their complete unfiltered self, sharing their honest thoughts, feelings without ever needing to self-censor. Joining Anima means joining a crew with exceptional talent density, and your crewmates will never let you down.
4. We hire talented people who think from first principles and have high growth potential - great decision makers who deserve to have complete autonomy and are forces of nature when empowered with it. Decisions are never made in isolation by the founders. All information is transparently available to the whole team on our Notion - every meeting, decision, success, failure. We have a live Retool dashboard which shows live MRR, linked to Stripe invoices.
5. We are deeply collaborative, and through mutual and self-challenge, we converge towards the optimum, and decisively execute. We are united by child-like intellectual curiosity and experiment and wander freely when the right path isn’t clear. We believe all future managers should be formidable individual contributors & domain experts.
6. We hire candidates from all over the world. We offer flexibility over work schedule and location.
7. We have a good time! We get the whole team together at least twice a year for team retreats, with the last ones in Brittany (France), La Paz (Mexico), Tuscany (Italy), Dominican Republic!

Why Join Anima? The entire company agrees that THE most important 2 power laws for Anima’s future success sit inside the People org

We sat down in our Winter 2024 offsite to elucidate the ‘10 power laws’ that we consider the most important superlinear drivers of success. In short, the first is a talent power law relating to maximising TOFU, and the second is a people power law relating to culture. We’re under no illusions that solving for just these two things would be sufficient to make ‘victory inevitable’ - for the right Talent leader, you’d join a company that is completely hyperaligned on going to unbelievable lengths to attract and retain true outliers (to that point, we organised a week long hackhouse dedicated just to building out the next phase of our talent infrastructure).

Currently, we’re 25 people, so you’d be joining at the most critical time for culture building. It’s your shot at building out a transformational vehicle for human wellbeing and personalised medicine, saving thousands - millions of lives. This is the perfect time to join: early enough to personally shape the entire future of the company, and at the same time, the company is almost entirely de-risked as a business: we’re at Series B/C metrics with very strong retention metrics and moat.

Does this sound like you?

• Hungry and wants their shot to change the world - a force of nature when empowered with the tools, resources and development to do it. Sees joining Anima as potentially their shot to do this, and takes duty to crew and mission extremely seriously.
• A gifted relationship builder, able to quickly build deep, meaningful connections across all levels. A litmus test: do you have a rolodex network of outlier talent, who trust you to the extent that you’re the first person they come to when they’re looking for their next thing?
• A talent scout, having brought in one in a million rockstars and able to intuitively spot outliers with uncanny accuracy, even at paper stage.
• Strong at all abstraction levels. Keen to understand the big picture & entire context of the company and vertical, and then directly solving for the highest level problems as an outlier IC.
• Holds incredibly high standards for themselves and possesses an unshakeable growth mindset, consistently pushing themselves and others toward excellence others would find unreasonable.
• Craves ownership in a high-autonomy, high-trust culture where every crew mate deeply cares about the ship and the mission. Wants to feel true belonging somewhere special.
• Able to define and operationalise proprietary playbook.

Some things you might do:

To recap, we’re looking for a high growth potential People & Talent Leader with a spike in GTM Talent (bonus if can span all technical hiring and People too), capable of building out an enduring company culture that can transform human wellbeing. Here are some things you might do:

• Help Anima scale to around 50-60 in 2025, focussing on low volume, rockstar hiring. Work backwards to solve pipeline rate limiting factors.
• Scale our hiring engine, operationalising and player-coach your proprietary playbook to the whole People org, creating pipeline predictability and repeatability. Help build a generational, enduring company culture.
• Own (or at least contribute to) the entire people lifecycle UX and global company culture. Drive incredible UX through world-class people programs, including onboarding, development, performance management, and compensation frameworks.
• (Bonus) Be a trusted culture champion and executive coach for non-technical skills, such as managing psychology, resilience, and mindfulness-based CBT.

Join us to do your life’s work.