Anima builds software to automate healthcare workflows. Today, it works directly with GP practices to automate many of their manual processes. CEO Shun Pang describes its mission as “to maximize human well-being.” Chief of Staff Celso explains the ambition in terms of personalised medicine: receiving the same quality of care as if you were being treated by the best doctor in the world as that doctor’s only patient.
For Shun, who trained as a doctor, that mission comes from seeing firsthand what happens when the healthcare system misses something important. Delivering on it takes a particular kind of team. Anima hires what he calls “AI native product builders”: people who combine technical ability with product judgement, spend time understanding customers’ work and take ownership of what to build next.
Finding those people had become a bottleneck. With Jill, Anima made its first hire within about a month. Through Jack and Jill, they met Tom Bale, a product engineer who had been looking for a career in a different field entirely.
A high bar, and too much time spent finding it
Before Jill, Anima relied mainly on inbound applications and recruiters. Hiring managers were reviewing hundreds of applications a day. Celso and the team were also spending dozens of hours each week on introductory calls with people who were unlikely to be a fit.
That time came directly out of building the business. Anima’s hiring managers were also some of its strongest individual contributors.
A search that dynamically improves
The product builder role was the first Anima brought to Jill.
“As soon as we started using Jill, the quality of candidates just skyrocketed,” Celso says.
What made the process work was the combination of a strong candidate pool and how quickly the team could refine it. Celso could give feedback on why he was advancing or passing on someone, or edit the hiring brief directly when a particular requirement became clear.
That feedback showed up in the next search immediately.
“Jill calibrates so quickly while I’m running a search that often, by the time I finish reviewing a cohort, there’s already a fresh search waiting for me to review.”
Celso, Chief of Staff, Anima
Celso could set aside one or two hours a day to screen candidates across eight roles, knowing that what he learned in one session would inform the next. The team could be exacting about who they wanted to meet and keep the search moving.
Tom wasn’t looking for healthtech
When Tom signed up to Jack, he was in his final year at university, thinking about what to do next. His interests were mainly in spatial AI. Healthcare was not on his list.
He was also sceptical that a conversation with an AI agent would produce anything more useful than his existing CV. But Jack picked up something Tom had left out: he had represented the UK in a high-performance computing competition. Jack put it in his profile headline. Tom then added it to his CV.
Introductions followed, including one to Anima. The combination of technically interesting work and a mission with a tangible impact made him curious.
“I could build something that was cool technically and also pretty impactful,” Tom says.
His first conversation with Celso centred on things he had built, including an unusual chess game that was not even on his CV. Tom had made it because he wanted it to exist. Celso saw connections between the ideas behind it and Anima’s triage product.
For Anima, it was evidence of the curiosity and initiative they were looking for. For Tom, it was a sign that he had found people who cared about the same things.
Responsibility from the start
Just over two months into the role, Tom had already been given the opportunity to revamp an entire product line, which he described as becoming a gateway to other Anima products.
“We’ve thrown him in the deep end and he’s thrived.”
Shun Pang, CEO, Anima
For Shun, Tom was someone Anima would not necessarily have discovered. Tom felt the same: without Jack and Jill, he thinks Anima would never have crossed his path.