Company to add blood analysis, social sharing features and an enterprise model to bring longevity into businesses.

Humanity, a leading health and longevity app, today launched a public crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder. The app’s founders are offering the public an opportunity to join investors, including the founders of Calm, Sweatcoin and Soundcloud, and back their mission to “give 1 billion years of health back to humanity.”

“What these guys have built already – is incredible,” said Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of Calm. “I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.”

Top of Humanity’s priority list is boosting the app’s viral growth engine to drive organic, exponential growth by adding more social features to make it more engaging, as well as introducing an Enterprise solution for businesses. Key priorities in the next phase of the app’s development include integrating blood analysis into its premium offerings and enhancing app features to support behavior change and health impact.

Longevity.Technology: By tracking aging biomarkers against what actions people are taking daily, Humanity uses machine learning and aging models trained on real-world outcomes to recommend personalized actions based on what’s working for other users like them. The app, already supported by investors such as Seedcamp, OneWay Ventures, Esther Dyson and a host of tech founders, boasts a 4.8-star rating on the Apple App Store, with more than 4,500 user reviews. To find out more, we caught up with Humanity’s co-founder Peter Ward.

Ward says the decision to crowdfund the next phase of the app’s journey is in keeping with Humanity’s core values.

“We’re witnessing a confluence of cutting-edge research in aging science, AI, and a societal shift towards health and prevention, culminating in the perfect moment – a moment that demands action now,” he explains. “We wanted to get more people involved in our mission so that we can accelerate our ability to achieve it. And secondly, our values of radical inclusion and open collaboration made us realize that we should try to give everybody the chance to be part of Humanity.”

Early bird benefits

Investors in the first $500,000 raised via the crowdfunding campaign will benefit from a $30 million valuation cap and a 15% discount.

“We’ve already closed $1.8 million with investors on the same terms, and we wanted to open it up to the crowd,” says Ward. “So, we’re offering an early bird opportunity, with preferential terms that essentially matching the terms on the funding that we’ve closed.”

Ward, along with his co-founder Michael Geer have assembled a world-class team, including distinguished science and business advisors, such as BioAge’s Kristen Fortney, LEV Foundation’s Aubrey de Grey, and renowned Harvard geneticist George Church.

“One of the things that our platform is trying to do is enable the validation of the health interventions that these scientists are trying to prove,” says Ward. “We’re trying to bring that to the mainstream and accelerate the validation of those discoveries through the platform. We’re there to try and help raise all ships.”

Rather than focus on downstream measures of health, Humanity focuses on key aging biomarkers, using AI and machine learning to suggest actions that aim to help users adopt sustainable behaviors for a healthier and longer life. The company claims it is already demonstrating results for users, with behavior changes leading to a median increase of 15.4% in movement after sign-up, rising to 18% for individuals with a BMI above 30.

From B2B to blood analysis

In terms of next steps for Humanity, Ward explains the importance of boosting the social elements of the app, a practice both he and Geer are very familiar with from their prior work at consumer apps including Badoo and WAYN.

“There’s a whole organic growth, engagement, retention piece that we’re going to focus on, using all the expertise that we’ve gleaned over the 15-20 years of doing this already,” he says. “We’ve worked in travel, social networking, dating, consumer VPN services to a billion users – so we’re doing that now, and it’s progressing really well.”

Another key priority for Humanity is to deliver an enterprise model of the platform. The company says it is in “advanced partnership discussions” with some of the world’s largest companies in the health and wellness sector.

“We’ve had a lot of inbound interest from some of the largest companies in the world who have a focus on health at large,” says Ward. “They’re interested in how we implement some of our capabilities into either their workforces, or to their customer bases, so that’s something that we are building the capabilities for. We’re building the tech stack for Humanity Enterprise where we will offer out the biological age element as an API to third parties.”

As far as new app features go, Ward says that the biggest one in the pipeline is probably the blood testing analysis capability, which is based on a blood aging model Humanity has submitted for peer-review.

“We’re essentially going to be able to analyze your blood markers from a multitude of different services that you may have had blood taken, including doctor’s visits,” he says. “We’re essentially able to analyze that and give you a biological age prediction. So, if you’ve already got your data, we can give more meaning to your data, and we don’t need to have a few specific biomarkers to do it – we can pull from a broad range of up to 60 biomarkers.”

Check out Humanity’s crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder.