Meet Humanity, the app health-tech investors are dying for – $5 million raised from 65 of the biggest health-tech and consumer-tech investors.
The ability to slow or even reverse your biological age has become a reality for everyone today as two serial entrepreneurs launch a solution that aims to extend the healthspan of humanity. Founders Pete Ward and Michael Geer teamed up over two years ago on a mission to create an app that can monitor users’ biological age and help them slow and even reverse it. This tool aims to enable users to possibly stay healthy and disease free for decades longer.
Longevity.Technology: Humanity, which launches today in the UK, and in the US and worldwide in the first week of September, has so far raised $5 million from 65 of the world’s leading health- and consumer-tech investors and founders including Alex Tew and Michael Acton-Smith (Co-Founders of Calm), Taavet Hinrikus (Co-Founder of Wise, founding team of Skype), Robin Thurston (Co-Founder of MyFitnessPal), One Way Ventures, 7Percent, Seedcamp, Breega, Alexander Ljung (CEO and Co-Founder of Soundcloud) and Esther Dyson, following oversubscribed interest. The beta app is now at capacity with over 10k users, and there is a waiting list of tens of thousands.
The founders have also attracted the backing and support of some of the world’s leading scientists onto their Science Advisory Board, including Kristen Fortney, Co-Founder of BioAge, George Church who helped map the Human Genome and is a Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Aubrey de Grey, one of the leading lights in the aging science movement and, Chief Science Officer at the SENS Research Foundation, among others.
Since launching a beta version of the app last year, Humanity is growing in popularity, with the majority of subscribers using it daily or weekly to monitor their aging and taking positive health actions. Within just a few months, the app reached the maximum number of users on TestFlight (Apple’s app testing facility) and has steadily grown a waiting-list of tens of thousands of would-be users.
Michael Geer, Co-Founder of Humanity says: “Aging remains the leading cause of disease globally, but few people make the connection between aging and their overall health – and most feel ultimately helpless to tackle it. Being ‘healthy’ is quite a nebulous term as it is completely personal to each individual. Being able to monitor your aging provides a truly holistic indicator of health, which could help reduce your probability of disease and extend the healthy lives of millions.”
In 2020, it was estimated that the Coronavirus pandemic cut life expectancy in England and Wales by one year, but
Humanity’s aim is to extend the global healthspan – years of fully functional health life. Extending healthspan should also have the knock-on effect of extending lifespan.
How it works – a dynamic health navigation system
Humanity is a navigation app for health. In much the same way that the Waze traffic app navigates users to their destination more quickly, the Humanity app compares users’ data with others similar to them and provides dynamic personalised advice and guidance that encourage more positive actions and ultimately can guide people on the quickest path to better health for longer.
Each positive action increases the users’ Humanity Score (H Score) in the app under one of four key categories – ‘movement’, ‘mind’ ‘recovery’ and ‘nutrition’. The higher the H Score over a sustained period of time, the increased probability that you will see a slowing or reversal in the aging process over time.
The Humanity app connects with sensors in your smartphone and wearable technology to track key biomarkers such as heart rate, step rate, sleep and activity to uniquely calculate each user’s ‘rate of aging’ and ‘biological age’ based on a series of machine learning algorithms that have been validated against real world outcomes from longitudinal biobanks (including the UK Biobank). Humanity combines in-house research and development with collaborations with other great scientists including the teams at Gero and Chronomics, and partnerships with companies like Illumina and Eurofins.
Peter Ward, CEO and Co-Founder of Humanity comments: “For years, fitness trackers and smart watches have monitored our calories and step-count to get us moving and increase our exercise, but until now there has been no way of understanding whether these things were actually making them healthier. Humanity is solving that problem by building a health navigation system for us all. Our mission is to help users understand exactly what actions are working to slow their aging, so they can live a healthier, longer, more resilient life.”
Humanity is available to download now in the UK and Ireland, and allows you to monitor your rate of aging completely free. A premium subscription service is available that also enables you to continuously monitor your biological age and the actions that are affecting it. Humanity will continue to introduce new updates, as well as launching more specific personalised guidance later in the year.
