Growing up in a family of doctors, Dan Vahdat witnessed firsthand how 24/7 treatment of patients often deteriorates as soon as they leave the hospital—which is typically when complications occur. Dan decided to dedicate himself to making healthcare more proactive through Huma Therapeutics, a London-based company he founded in 2011. Huma’s digital platforms are used by more than 3,000 hospitals and millions of individuals worldwide. In July 2024, Huma raised more than $80 million in funding to support its new, gen-AI-enabled Huma Cloud Platform. In this episode of The Venture, Dan sat down with McKinsey’s Timothy Yap to discuss Huma’s mission, the crucial roles of AI and wearable sensors, the company’s embrace of the app economy, and why success still depends more on people than technology.
An edited transcript of the podcast follows. For more conversations on venture building, subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Podcast transcript
Andrew Roth: From McKinsey’s business-building practice, Leap, I’m Andrew Roth, and welcome to The Venture, a series featuring conversations with legendary venture builders about how to design, launch, and scale new businesses. In each episode, we cut through the noise to bring practical advice on how leaders can build successful businesses from scratch.
Timothy Yap: Dan, thanks very much for joining us on The Venture Podcast. Huma is a company we’ve wanted to interview for a while now, because it’s an interesting player in the medtech space.
When you founded Huma, what gave you the conviction to start the business? What’s your founder’s story?
Dan Vahdat: Thanks for having me, Tim. I grew up in a family of doctors, and worked and studied at medical centers. So I saw how people with certain sicknesses get treated, and how much effort and energy we put into them when they’re inside the four walls of a clinic or hospital. Then as soon as they leave the hospital, suddenly we know nothing. And complications often happen outside of the hospital.
Technically, we can be proactive, but not if we don’t know anything about it. That’s why medicine is fundamentally more reactive than proactive, and I wanted to change that. I thought, this is a mission that someone has to take on with a long-term plan of 20, 30, or even 40 years.
What we are trying to do is take someone from point A, where you have some sort of condition that’s not being managed or looked after, to point B, where your disease or condition is being managed. You want to take people through this journey in as thoughtful, seamless, scalable, and consistent a way as possible.
Timothy Yap: What did you see as the technological issue that prevented this problem from being addressed?
Dan Vahdat: To do any proactive care, you need a computer always with you, and that computer needs input, which in the medical world means data from sensors that measure vital signs. These sensors also interact with you and collect feedback, like symptoms or prompts directly from users. Based on those, you give something back to users so they get some benefit and stay engaged.
None of these things existed ten years ago when we started Huma. But as technology has evolved, such as wearable sensors that can monitor your vital signs, the missing parts are coming together. And I think the last missing part is these new AI models that ultimately enable us to bring the kind of constant supervision real-time monitoring requires.
In the old world, it would’ve been really hard to scale, with nurses and doctors on call 24/7. But now, with these new AI models, not only can we collect real-time data, we can actually drive real-time interventions. And we feel this is just the beginning.
Timothy Yap: How has your product vision changed over the past ten years, and how have you leveraged the best of the technology?
Dan Vahdat: As technology evolved, and reached levels of usability that everybody can access, we became bolder. Because we realized we could do something even bigger than we imagined. Having a dream versus suddenly seeing a path—even if it’s a narrow path—to actually get there are two very different things.
There was a time when our big dream of impacting everybody in the world and building one of the biggest digital health companies was just something we thought would be very cool. But then wearable sensors like smart watches arrived, and we thought, “We can actually start getting into the healthcare delivery side with a very light touch, implement our technologies, and have some control units of our own.”
When the new AI models evolved, we began to believe we could maybe become the largest healthcare company in the world. And then, through our Huma Cloud Platform and US and EU regulatory approval of our disease-agnostic Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) platform, we realized we could enable everybody else to build great healthcare or health tech companies on our foundation.
We drive certain use cases ourselves, but at the same time, we also support others to do things we can’t or don’t want to do. Each of these things—basically each step, each new technology—opened our eyes to the art of possibility. This is the most exciting time for me since I founded Huma, but I think it’s also one of the most exciting times for the industry as a whole.
Timothy Yap: How do you see the potential of gen AI? A lot of people are talking about gen AI and AI in general. How do you see it impacting your business?
Dan Vahdat: We’re currently using it in two ways. We have our Huma Cloud Platform, which anybody can use to configure healthcare solutions—and, depending on the modules and functionality used, they may quickly receive US and EU approval, thanks to our good global coverage. That is just fantastic, because in the old world, regulatory approval would’ve taken four or five years. In the new world, it only takes a few days.
I also wanted to make the platform so simple that when you sit in front of the CEO of a pharma company or hospital with a laptop, you can tell them, “Type any application you want, like a heart-failure monitoring application for patients with lung cancer.” Then it quickly creates a minimal viable product (MVP) app. Seeing suddenly becomes believing. That is one gen AI use case: making it super-simple for people to interact with something considered complicated, without any technological, regulatory, or scaling problems.
In the second use case, we wanted to put the stakeholders, like nurses, in charge of managing diseases far more efficiently. In the old world, a nurse could look after 200 patients. But we wanted to see if we could help the same nurse, working less, look after ten times more, or 2,000 patients. Last year, we launched the “10x Nurse” feature based on a new AI model specifically designed to solve this problem.
That feature is live across all of our deployments in the United States, and we are planning to roll it out in the coming months outside of the United States as well. I’m not saying it’s 10x quite yet, but it takes care of all the menial work a nurse has to do, like looking things up and inputting data, in just two seconds.
Timothy Yap: Everybody talks about funding cycles, the pressure of funding timelines, investors, and VCs. How have you managed to maintain this focus on creating value for people and patients in the longer term?
Dan Vahdat: I think being reactive to your environment as you build the company is extremely important. Otherwise, you almost end up fighting nature. And fighting nature is never a good idea. If you’re swimming in a river, ideally, you want to swim with the flow rather than against it. What that means in our world is to pick the use cases that can attract initial investment, because that gets you in. And it’s more important for you to be in the water rather than sitting on the shore.
If the market expects you to drive revenue, and growth is the most important thing, and that means you’re a little more aggressive and are going to be inefficient in terms of your cost base and profitability, that’s OK. But if the market dynamic changes, you’ve got to change quickly. If the market suddenly cares about profitability, this is something you’ve got to do. And by the way, there are often good reasons for it. So being adaptable is important.
Finally, you’ve got to believe in what you do. And if you do, try to make people see your game, your ambition, your aim, your strategy, from your lens rather than trying to fit yourself into a specific VC lens or framework. Because that is usually a losing game. We never played the VC game. We always said, “This is what we want, this is what we are doing. Do you like it or not?”
Timothy Yap: You told me you’ve had lots of experience with investors and customers. Could you say a little bit more about that?
Dan Vahdat: There are two types of companies: companies that do whatever is happening, but ten times faster, better, cheaper, and more efficient, maybe taking something physical and making it digital, something that has happened in many industries—so there is lots of pattern recognition there. Then there are companies that are basically building a new category.
On the customer side, I think the biggest problem is that new technology can potentially transform an entire industry, and some of the big players adopt it, and some don’t. We have seen this with digital photography, where some of the biggest names in the photography business no longer exist.
That means the people at the top either don’t understand what is happening on a technological level for their industry, or they’re not prioritizing it. Either way, you can be in a bad place. That’s why one of my requirements for partnering with life science companies is I need to see and talk to the CEO once a quarter.
If I cannot talk to the CEO, I’d really rather not partner with that company. Because by having that channel, I can educate the CEO about the things we’re doing, but also learn a ton from that CEO about their challenges.
That kind of collaboration is important to help us educate them, and also become educated, because we are clueless about their organizations. Having that partnership and exchange of priorities and understanding is extremely important, and often leads to much better outcomes if done correctly.
Timothy Yap: Huma is a platform company. How do you make a platform company successful?
Dan Vahdat: You need to have an app economy, which in the world of the Huma platform means that if someone builds an app for a specific use case, there are lots of possibilities. It could be educational content about a disease, a specific care pathway, or an algorithm or widget someone used our platform to build. We need to give these options to anyone that builds stuff on top of our platform.
Not only can they commercialize their own app with all the bells and whistles through us, they can also put all these individual components into the marketplace. If someone else wanted to launch an app for a similar use case, they can license that content, the care pathway, the algorithms or widgets, and benefit financially. Because often, someone developing applications for one country or use case does not have the ambition to go outside of that country or use case.
This way, their innovation and intellectual property can become accessible and generate revenue for them in every use case other people may end up utilizing. That’s one part of our app economy, and we are excited about it.
The second part of the app economy, which I think is unique to healthcare companies, is the fact that we are collecting a lot of data. And the companies building their stuff on top of us are collecting a lot of data. What if we create a data lake with all the proper consent, considerations, and regulatory approval? Whoever contributes to this data lake could also access the anonymized data to improve their technology and innovate.
That way, we won’t help create a world where a few people sit on lots of data and with an unfair advantage for advancing medicine. Instead, we’ll be trying to democratize the advancement of medicine with patient data, real-time data, insights, and interventions. That’s the second pillar of our app economy. That’s how we are thinking about our platform business while we are still at the beginning, and it took us ten years to get to this point.
Timothy Yap: What advice would you give to people, reflecting on your journey so far? Any career-defining moments that shaped you and Huma?
Dan Vahdat: I think the most important part of a company is the people, and hiring people who genuinely care. And that “genuinely care” part is a tough one, because everybody tells you they care, especially when you’re at the intersection of healthcare and technology. People tell you whatever you want to hear. But finding those people and keeping them is really important.
The other thing is when you found a category-shaping company, nobody knows how to do it. Even if you hire the most important executive of whatever company, they wouldn’t know any better than you. The only differences are their high opinions of themselves and expectations of a large salary, things that are not good for your company.
I have not seen a single example of any big executive from any industry joining a start-up and actually making a difference. It often leads to lots of conflict and expensive experiments, in my view. That’s why most successful start-ups are built by people with small egos coming together and dedicating themselves to solving a specific problem.
I think if people are thoughtful, do not give up, build resilience, and prepare themselves for the long game rather than the short one, they’ll be successful. I have no doubt. You just have to be prepared never to give up and, if needed, to suffer with fewer people working a lot harder. I work a lot more than I did four years ago. And four years ago, it was unimaginable to me that I could ever work harder. But it’s always possible.
Timothy Yap: That’s a real lesson in intensity and keeping up with the pace of change. Thanks very much, Dan. It’s been fantastic to have you on the show.
Dan Vahdat: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
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