Health IT · Primary care operating systems
Anima
A care enablement platform built by a doctor who quit medicine to fix how UK general practice handles patient requests. It is now live in hundreds of NHS clinics and, in 2025, also became the subject of an NHS reporting error involving its AI note tool.
A backend written by a doctor
Shun Pang trained as a doctor at Cambridge and worked as a primary care physician in London before he stopped practising medicine. He has said he was tired of breaking bad news to patients, again and again, for problems he believed were avoidable if care plans had arrived sooner. He taught himself to write software and wrote much of Anima's early backend himself.
Rachel Mumford, his co-founder and COO, had her own reason. Her family lost her grandmother after what Crunchbase News described as a series of missed screening questions and an eventual missed diagnosis. Both founders had worked at the UK Treasury and, Pang has said, considered whether policy work could produce change faster. They decided it could not, and built a company instead.
The problem: information flow between appointments
Anima's pitch rests on a gap in how general practice works. A patient calls a clinic, is given a fixed appointment slot, and only then does a clinician start gathering information about what is wrong. For something minor, ten minutes is enough. For something serious, Pang has argued, it is not, and without information flowing between appointments a clinician cannot tell which bucket a patient falls into until the visit has already started.
Anima's answer was automated total triage: a patient submits a problem online, a questionnaire gathers a structured history linked to clinical guidelines and red flags, and a report reaches the practice's dashboard so staff can decide whether the case needs a same day call, a routine appointment, a prescription or nothing at all. The company's stated aim, repeated since its earliest funding announcement, is to get patients to the right care within 24 hours.
From triage seed to a clinic operating system
Anima went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch and, in March 2021, raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Hummingbird Ventures, with Amino Collective and angels also participating. It was then live in two clinics covering 10,000 patients and had raised $2.7 million in total, according to Pang.
The company launched its first paying clinics in September 2022. In March 2024, Anima announced an oversubscribed Series A led by Molten Ventures, with Hummingbird, Amino Collective and Y Combinator returning and new angels including Sidar Sahin, founder of Peak Games. The company put the round at $12 million (reported elsewhere as €11 million). At that point Anima said it was deployed in over 150 NHS clinics serving 1.3 million patients.
Anima also describes a longer term ambition it calls Anima 2.0, built around a proprietary AI named Annie. In practice, through 2025, Annie shipped first as an ambient scribe: a tool that drafts a consultation note, suggested codes and patient messages for a clinician to review.
Growth, and a public misstep
By April 2025, GPonline reported Anima was live in more than 400 GP practices covering more than 2 million patients, and covered Annie's launch as a standalone scribe. A GP partner at Cliff House Medical Practice said Annie cut his documentation time from three or four minutes per consultation to about a minute, saving an hour or two a day.
Three months later, Fortune reported a different story. A London patient in his mid twenties was sent a letter inviting him to a diabetic eye screening despite never having been diagnosed with diabetes. He and a nurse found an AI generated summary, credited to "Annie AI," describing him as having Type 2 diabetes, medication he was not taking, and a visit for chest pain and shortness of breath attributed to "likely angina due to coronary artery disease." The visit it was meant to describe was for tonsillitis. The record also cited a fictitious "Health Hospital" on "456 Care Road" in "Health City," with an invented postcode.
An NHS spokesperson, Dr Matthew Noble, told Fortune the practice made "limited use of supervised AI" and called it a "one-off case of human error," saying a staff member had saved an earlier, unreviewed draft. He said Anima's tool only suggests summaries to a human reviewer. Anima Health did not respond to Fortune's questions.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate structure | UK entity Continuum Health Limited (Companies House 12205370), incorporated 13 September 2019, Shun Pang sole director. On 25 January 2021 a US company, Anima Group Inc., became the person with significant control, matching the stated 2021 founding date. Anima Group Inc. also registered a UK establishment (BR025788) that month, same Covent Garden address. | Public record |
| MHRA device status | Fortune and Anima's NHS compliance letter both describe Annie as an MHRA Class I medical device, the lowest risk tier, with the company pursuing Class IIa. | Company-stated, corroborated |
| NHS assurance framework | Anima states it holds IM1 assurance (renewed January 2025), NHS DSPT assurance, Cyber Essentials Plus, and a completed DCB0129 Clinical Safety Case with a named Clinical Safety Officer. Not independently verified beyond the company's own pages. | Company-stated |
| Deployment and patient reach | 2 clinics, 10,000 patients (Apr 2021); over 150 NHS clinics, 1.3 million patients (Mar 2024 Series A); over 200 clinics, 2 million patients (later 2024 blog); over 400 GP practices, 2 million plus patients (Apr 2025, independent trade press). | Company-stated, partly corroborated |
| Fortune reporting on false AI records | A patient's record held a fabricated diabetes diagnosis, fictitious medication and an invented hospital address, generated by Annie. NHS England attributed the resulting screening invitation to a staff member saving an unreviewed draft, not a software defect. Anima did not comment to Fortune. | Independent reporting |
| Peer-reviewed publications and trials | No PubMed record or registered clinical trial found for Anima, Shun Pang or Rachel Mumford as of September 2026. | Not found |
Read plainly: Anima has built genuine NHS distribution and a compliance story it documents on its own site. What is independently confirmed is thinner: one detailed press investigation exists, describing a failure mode, an AI summary containing invented clinical facts, reaching a patient's official record before a human caught it. No published study measures how often Annie's outputs are wrong or how often reviewers catch errors before they are saved.
What to watch
- Whether Anima's tools are reclassified from MHRA Class I to Class IIa, a step the company says it is pursuing and that Fortune reported several UK digital health companies were racing toward in mid 2025.
- Whether NHS England or the MHRA publishes findings from its review of the diabetes misdiagnosis case, or its broader scrutiny of Ambient Voice Technology flagged in a June 2025 priority notification.
- Named, published clinical evidence for Annie's accuracy, beyond one GP testimonial and company-reported time savings cited in trade coverage.
- Anima's next funding round. A Delaware vehicle named for an "Anima Iris" financing filed with the SEC in October 2025, months after the last confirmed round, suggesting further capital activity not yet announced publicly.
In their words
“We want to catch health problems in people as early as possible, get them seen by a doctor and reduce the time they wait to do that to under 24 hours.”
Shun Pang, co-founder and CEO, Crunchbase News, April 2021 · Interview
“I’m doubly technical. I trained as a doctor at Cambridge, and I’m a self-taught software engineer who wrote a lot of the code for Anima. I was essentially building what I myself had wanted, and knew would save lives.”
Shun Pang, TechCrunch, March 2024 · Interview
“He showed me the notes on the system, and they were AI-generated summaries. It was at that point I realized something weird was going on.”
The affected patient, quoted anonymously, Fortune, July 2025 · Independent
“No documents are ever processed by AI, Anima only suggests codes and a summary to a human reviewer in order to improve safety and efficiency. Each and every document requires review by a human before being actioned and filed.”
Dr Matthew Noble, NHS spokesperson, quoted in Fortune, July 2025 · Independent
“It means that I can spend a lot more time focusing on the interaction with the person I'm talking to rather than having to spend a great deal of time documenting.”
Dr Rehaan Ansari, GP partner, Cliff House Medical, quoted in GPonline, April 2025 · Independent
“When Rachel and I founded Anima back in 2021, it was personal. We'd both had deeply painful experiences with the healthcare system, and we knew there had to be a better way.”
Shun Pang, Anima Series A announcement, animahealth.com, 2024 · Company blog
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordCompanies House, Continuum Health Limited, company number 12205370, officers and filing history
- Public recordCompanies House, Anima Group Inc., UK establishment BR025788
- Public recordSEC Form D, Anima Group Inc., CIK 0002000249
- Public recordSEC Form D, Anima Iris Jun 2025 a Series of CGF2021 LLC, CIK 0002092477
- IndependentUK health service AI tool generated a set of false diagnoses for a patient
- IndependentExclusive: Anima Targets Better Health Triage With $2.5M Seed
- IndependentHealthcare platform Anima brings Salesforce-like capabilities to clinics, raises $12M
- IndependentLondon-based Anima snaps €11 million Series A
- IndependentAnima Raises $12M in Series A Funding
- IndependentLondon-Based Anima Raises $2.5M to Reduce Preventable Deaths
- IndependentHow AI-powered scribes can help cut GP workload
- IndependentAI triage in the NHS (2025): Anima, PATCHS AI, Klinik and others
- CompanyAnima company profile
- CompanyAnima homepage and case studies
- CompanyAnnouncing our Series A
- CompanySecurity and compliance page
- CompanyAnima, Full Compliance with NHS England AVT Requirements
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
