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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We hire candidates from all over the world. We offer flexibility over work schedule and location.
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!
Do you want to save lives with every clinic that you onboard?
Please note that as this role may involve site work and on-site support for our users, we can only consider your application if you are based in the UK. You will not be able to complete our screening task if you are not based in the UK, so please bear this in mind when submitting your application. We hope to welcome you to the team soon!
Join Anima, and you'll use your influence and people skills to get Anima into clinics and entire regions: an urgently needed product that saves lives amid critical levels of patient demand, with healthcare systems in crisis across the globe.
Since launching in the UK a year ago, we're now used in by GP practices, primary care networks and federations across the country who collectively provide care for over 2 million patients.
Have amazing stakeholder conversations with users who fanatically love the product, and steer our product direction
Our current distribution team have said that one of the biggest perks of working at Anima is seeing the delight and disbelief on people’s faces when we show them our demo, something that is truly a 10x generational leap. Here’s what some of our users have been saying:
*“I sent a plan to the patient and it’s incredible, within a few minutes they’re coming back to me saying that they can make the appointment!”
"I would call that next generation, I think you have that badge"
”Sometimes you need to stop driving a Fiesta and buy a Mercedes"*
Lots of us went into medicine because we wanted to maximise our positive impact. At Anima, we understand that distribution is the other half of a legendary product. Here are incredible things we’ve built as a result of our fullstack sales team:
A Clinical Director at one of our practices wanted to streamline multiple access channels and make access equitable and fair. After some great discovery and deep listening, the AM together with the customer suggested we build something called ‘proxy requests’, which would allow the reception team at a clinic to complete Anima requests on behalf of a patient who was on a landline call - this made it possible to give someone with no internet or mobile phone the same access to care. This is now one of our most popular features that has led to viral referrals and fanatical users.
One of our fullstack account managers, realised that adding a configurable feature that allows patients to self-book appointments directly into the electronic health record calendar would be critical to closing large enterprise accounts. By deeply understanding the pain points and anxieties underlying the feature, Anima built the feature in 9 days, to the great excitement of users at demo calls and $1m+ ACV meetings.
Off the back of fanatical referrals from our existing users, the team was invited to present to NHS England at national and regional level, and we’ve been helping to shape the future of the primary care market through an upcoming $1bn+ procurement framework.
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.
Exceptional communicator, able to distill complex information into clear and concise bullets without jargon. An excellent conduit between users and the rest of the company.
Able to execute a high sigma discovery process and in combination with incisive people intuition, elucidate deep pain points and opportunities to excite within minutes of the first call.
Has incredibly high standards for themselves and an unshakeable growth mindset: able to challenge themselves and those around them to push to do things better.
Exceptionally organised: able to build & maintain multiple relationships across a diverse range of organisations, and consistently execute on plans to onboard and retain users. Reliably follows up on 100% of qualified leads at optimal intervals.
A gifted relationship builder, able to quickly build rapport and emotional anchors with almost anyone and any persona.
Pragmatic rather than dogmatic in decision making: able to weigh real world data appropriately, changing course when necessary towards optimal outcomes for patients and clinicians.
Keen to understand the big picture & entire context of the company and vertical; impatient to grow towards a senior executive role.
Seeks to maximise combined team productivity, communicating the right things at the right time through the right channels.
Intellectually curious and loves learning - able to tackle entirely novel challenges that lack prior precedent through first principles thinking, creatively using the right pragmatic approach, with an understanding of alternatives and trade offs.
We’re particularly interested if you have demonstrated history of scaling B2B/enterprise SaaS businesses from 2 to 10MM+ ARR, independently closing deals of $100k+ ACV. For this role, you will need to be based in the UK. You will have:
Been the 1st sales hire and built a high performing team around you
‘Led by Example’ with experience in building and coaching sales teams, consistently delivering on quarterly bookings and ARR targets.
Have leadership experience in enterprise/complex consultative sales, having managed all aspects of go-to-market strategies while driving revenue growth
Demonstrated success in creating, implementing and coaching GTM playbooks that drive revenue growth and market expansion.
Proficient in the use of CRM and sales enablement tools to support the building, analysis, and optimization of the sales process.
Our current users & what to expect from the role
We're live with GP teams across the country, being used by teams across the NHS. Over the rest of 2024, we're continuing to onboard teams that want to build the future of healthcare, and will be working with the NHS to deploy Anima at regional & national level. We’ll also be identifying international partners to power Anima’s next stage of growth.
We’re looking to add talented sales leaders who understand the urgency and importance of what we’re doing for society and are hungry to make impact. Our VP Sales has a 90%+ e2e close rate, and the distro org averages about 80%. Our CAC payback, gross margin, retention are all world class and you'll be joining an exceptional team with top metrics for SaaS, despite being in a traditionally slower vertical.
First month - some examples of what to expect:
Lead user discovery & demo calls to develop a deep understanding of their fundamental motivations and needs/pain points, and translate this into the optimal roadmap of features.
Join the team at events & conferences, speaking to potential users, leading demos and converting leads.
Take on account management responsibility for larger accounts e.g. GP federations and ICSs (covering 1m+ patients).
Collaborating with VP Sales to optimize the selling process, including forecast methodologies, sales strategy, and compensation programs, while implementing effective operational processes - to maximise discounted team productivity, and minimise discounted dev time of the features that will lead to maximum conversion.
Next 6 months - some examples of what to expect:
Own forecast numbers for your team
Coach sales teams to enhance pipeline numbers and performance, reflected in their OKRs. Identify potential for growth and develop strategies to nurture talent.
Implement strategies to optimize sales distribution channels, ensuring maximum market penetration.
Personally lead deal closures and coach team members in effective deal-closing techniques.
6+ months - some examples of what to expect:
Recruit and onboard new AEs
Work with the team to scale our sales & marketing, including working with NHS leaders to identify and secure regional & national-level procurement opportunities, including those beyond primary care.
