What if you knew exactly how to slow down your aging? That’s the premise behind a startup called Humanity.
Humanity is a mobile app that enables you to monitor your rate of aging and then receive guidance for how to slow it down.
Using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, this app discovers your daily habits and those of others like you. It then offers tips and actions to take in order to improve your “H Score,” a metric for helping you understand how quickly you’re aging.
Humanity is backed by professional investors Seedcamp and OneWay Ventures, as well as the co-founders of Calm, a health-and-wellness app once valued at two billion dollars. The company’s founders have previously scaled consumer apps to one billion users and achieved successful exits.
These days, we’re living longer. Life expectancy in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 100+ years. A man born in 1900, for example, wasn’t expected to live to the age of fifty. But a man born in 1990 can expect to live well past seventy years.
That said, we’re still aging. And the older we get, the more likely we are to suffer from things like arthritis, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. These conditions can be painful and life-threatening. They also wreak havoc on the U.S. healthcare system, where direct costs of treating these diseases can surpass $500 billion.
This explains why trying to delay the aging process — i.e., live healthier for longer — has become a market that Bank of America projects will be worth at least $600 billion by 2025. And this growing market has attracted the attention of professional investors. In 2013, venture-capital funding in this sector was less than $400 million. Last year, the total invested surpassed four billion dollars through just the first six months of the year.
Humanity is a Boston-based startup that’s targeting the market for longevity with its innovative mobile platform. Here’s how it works:
Users download the Humanity mobile app and create an account. From there, the platform begins tracking parts of your daily life that play key roles in the aging process, things like movement, nutrition, mental health, and recovery.
Additionally, Humanity monitors biomarkers like heart rate and walking speed, as well as blood markers like fasting glucose, cholesterol, and full-blood count. You can even access the most advanced way of monitoring your aging, which involves analyzing your genes and profiling your DNA.
All this information is combined to create your H Score. And from there, you’ll learn how to improve this score and, thus, slow down the aging process.
Humanity uses a freemium business model. Users can download the app and create an account for free. They can also find out their biological age based on lifestyle and genetic factors.
For sixty dollars a year, users can upgrade to Premium. This offers the ability to track your age difference, earn daily gems for actions taken, and see how actions affect similar users.
Humanity launched in 2019. More than 160,000 users have since signed up.
The platform has a 4.8-star rating on more than 4,500 reviews on the Apple App Store. Meanwhile, Humanity is working on securing partnerships to launch business-to-business pilots with one of the world’s largest hardware and software companies, one of the largest health and wellness retailers, and one of the largest health and fitness apps.
Humanity is generating minimal revenue. But according to its team, product development, not revenue, was the main focus in 2023. Revenue is a bigger priority this year, and the company forecasts to reach more than three million dollars in 2024.