Humanity

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.

Team Background

Peter Ward - Co-Founder & CEO

Peter began his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the Big Four accounting firms in the U.S., managing clients including Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. From there, he became a management consultant with Accenture, a professional-services firm.

In 2010, he became an advisor with PURE Holiday Homes, a London-based vacation-rental platform, where he advised the CEO on fundraising, product development, and mergers &
acquisitions. PURE was acquired by Leisure Group in 2011.

Peter co-founded Where Are You Now?, a socially-focused travel service. Under his leadership, the platform reached twenty-two million users and won the Best Social Travel Network award by World Travel Awards three times. The company raised nearly twenty million dollars, and was acquired by lastminute.com Group in 2016.

More recently, Peter was a non-executive director with Ocean Bottle, a London-based retail business. He also co-founded the International Conclave of Entrepreneurs, a collection of founders and investors aiming to create a technology network. He co-founded Humanity in 2019.

He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business Finance from Brunel University London, and studied Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge, London Business School, and MIT.

Peter Joshi - Chief Science Officer

Peter is a leader in the genetic-aging field and specializes in measuring and understanding biological age.

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh, he became a managing director of marketing with Standard Life UK, a financial-services company. From there, he became a business development and strategy director with Tesco Bank.

For nine years, he was a tenured chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he obtained his Ph.D in Genomics in 2014. He remained at the university through 2020, after which he became an advisor with the Global Gene Corporation, a research company creating a biological data bank to help create new drug therapies.

In addition to his role with Humanity, Peter is the Founder of Geromica, a consulting business focused on healthy aging practices.

Michael Geer - Co-Founder & CSO

Michael started as an account manager with Young & Rubicam, a New York-based advertisingservices company. While there, he worked with notable brands including Colgate, Kraft, and Land Rover.

He then joined the founding team at Badoo, a freemium dating app that grew to seventy million users and eventually merged with competitor Bumble to create the largest dating website in the world. From there, he joined Where Are You Now?, the travel service co-founded by Peter Ward, as its Chief Operating Officer.

More recently, Michael co-founded a handful of startups including CauseCart, a platform for donating to various charities and social causes. He then became Chief Operating Officer, and later Chief Strategy Officer, with AnchorFree, a technology-services company offering a secure, private way to surf the internet. This company was named “Most Innovative Security Company” by Fast Company in 2019, and was among America’s “Most Promising Companies,” per Forbes. The service scaled to 900 million users and a majority stake was sold for $300 million.

Michael earned a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and earned a certificate in Genetics and Genomics from Stanford.

Co-Investors

Seedcamp

A UK-based venture-capital firm investing in early-stage startups.

One Way Ventures

A Boston-based venture-capital firm.