One liner: Humanity is an app that uses wearable technology and quantified-self methods to enable anyone with a smartphone to measure their rate of aging and it uses AI to find out what lifestyle actions and more advanced interventions each type of user should take to slow it down: ”a Waze for longevity”.

Longevity Dealflow WG Team Shepherd: Eli Mohamad Other squad members: Laurence Ion, Paolo Binetti, Tuan Dinh, Alex Dobrin, Tim Peterson

Simple Summary Humanity is a quantified-self app that enables users to connect physical wearables and activity apps that monitor digital biomarkers through a single interface. Users may manually add data as well and soon will be able to upload blood and genetic data. The data from all these sources is used to generate a proprietary score representing the rate of the user’s aging. Importantly, the app then helps users understand which activities and habits slow down or even reverse their current rate of aging. The company uses multiple established behavior modification tools to steer user behavior, and develops its own tools and biomarkers, with the goal of sourcing, distributing and guiding users to take better healthspan interventions over time.

VitaDAO collaboration potential beyond financing Humanity uses “points” to reward users for actions. The Humanity team is very open to discussing what role $Vita may be able to play as a “longevity token” in or adjacent to the app. Such exploration would be in line with the VitaDAO Strategic Plan of 2023. For example, even just expanding our token users by 150k people (the current Humanity userbase) may be a great benefit to VitaDAO.

Problem and Opportunity The development of drug or biologics-based therapies addressing chronic and other aging-related diseases is an extremely expensive and time-intensive endeavor. We are yet to see a drug or therapy that significantly extends the human healthspan. On the other hand, behavioral modifications such as diet, physical activity, sleep, and stress, have been shown to have an incredible impact on human healthspan. Exercise alone (in the form of weightlifting and aerobic activity), has been associated with a >40% decrease in all-cause mortality risk.

Instead of attacking chronic diseases one by one, Humanity is pursuing development and implementation of behavioral interventions that slow aging, potentially adding many more healthy years than any single drug or therapy that would cure any of the top chronic disease killers today.

The rate-of-aging scores are calculated by proprietary algorithms built on longitudinal data (External Biobank Database). The algorithms are improved by continuously combining data from existing users (Humanity Biobank Database), enabling the discovery of better metrics and better combinations of digital and physical biomarkers to eventually being able to increase the positive impact of interventions and behavioral modification. Behaviors are gamified based on points (in-game currency) as well as digital twins (i.e. what worked for “similar” users best), increasing user retention and activity.

Current traction reflects the perception of app utility by the (still) early users. With a 10% conversion to premium users, as well as 65% 12-week retention of premium users, the app’s metrics are significantly above industry numbers.

High retention may also be explained by the apparent success of Humanity’s behavioral modification tools. A clinically obese cohort (i.e. those that can gain most from behavioral modification) experienced an 18% (15.4% median for all active users) sustained increase in movement after signing up, over the lifespan of the observational study (80 days - 40 days before and 40 days after sign up to Humanity).

Intellectual property Humanity endeavors to improve a “digital first” aging model they developed based on UK Biobank data and a partnership with Gero, which uses movement and heart rate patterns along with other attributes of the user to measure aging daily.

Possibly the most unique IP is the creation of a database of what actions and interventions are working in combination to reduce different types of people’s rates of aging. The combination of actions/interventions and what type of person each combination works for is information no other project currently has a reasonable ability to collect at scale. Humanity has the potential to reach hundreds of millions of users directly.

Future upgrades: While the company’s focus remains on digital biomarkers, it aims to add genetic and blood monitoring services and already has those relationships set up with Illumina and Eurofins. The data gathered from these products (e.g. genotyping and DNA methylation), and combined with digital biomarkers, may yield yet additional IP.

Team The Humanity founding team are seasoned serial entrepreneurs who previously launched extremely successful digital consumer platforms and exited their companies. They are also reportedly long time supporters of the Longevity sector.

Peter Ward, CEO and co-founder After starting his career in management consulting, Peter co-founded, built and ran the world’s largest social travel network for over 13 years: WAYN.com. After selling the company to lastminute.com group in 2016, Peter successfully launched and rolled out ContentHUB - a state-of-the-art site personalization CMS. He then grew WAYN revenues by 194%, and increased monthly visits by 55% in just 12 months post-acquisition.

Michael Geer, CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) and co-founder Before co-founding Humanity, Michael was CSO/COO of AnchorFree, running one of the world’s most popular freedom and privacy digital platforms. Anchorfree apps grew by over 100M downloads in just 12 months, and approximately 400,000 people download an AnchorFree App every day. Michael helped the platform grow to 900M users. Previously, Michael was on the founding team of Badoo, and grew it into one of the largest dating sites worldwide. Badoo was sold for $3 bn.

The company has an advisory board of some of the world’s top scientists and thinkers, including Kristen Fortney (CEO of Bioage), George Church (HMS), Robert Green (HMS), Tonu Esko (Direct at Estonian Biobank) and Peter Joshi (CSO at Humanity Inc).

Financing Humanity has previously raised $5M, and the team is currently raising $1M in a standard SAFE, of which $950k has been committed. VitaDAO could contribute the last $50,000 to close this round. The team anticipates starting to raise a ~5M Seed Round later in 2023.

The use of capital would be for development salaries, marketing, and operations.

Strengths

• Excellent team, with ample experience in growing the userbase for digital platforms
• Grew to >150k users in 12 months
• Appstore 4.8 rating with 2.5k ratings
• Potential for making digital biomarkers as significant in chronic disease prediction as blood biomarkers, enabling earlier and more substantial interventions to extend healthspan
• Captive audience for experimental interventions and tests
• Freemium subscription has been shown to work in the quantified-self field

Risks

• Highly competitive landscape - further exploration on strength of IP is needed
• The team is yet to prove the ability to extend healthspan through more complex interventions in addition to increasing physical activity or extending fasting windows
• Experimental plans yet to be developed

Evaluation

This proposal has been evaluated by 3 business experts and scientists, obtaining an average conviction score of 4/5. The reviewers agreed the biggest strength of the proposal is the team and the fact the company is open to experiment with $VITA. While engagement has seen a drop in the beginning of this year, it followed a large drop in marketing expenses. This is expected to reverse starting March.