Today, Hum turns five.
Start-ups live and die by their pivots, and the truth is, many don’t make it this far. We’re proud to say Hum has done more than just “survive” our pivots; we’ve grown sharper and bolder with each turn of the wheel.
From CDP beginnings…
When Hum launched in 2020, we were a customer data platform (CDP) for associations. We were all about giving mission-driven organizations the kind of insight into their members that consumer brands had enjoyed for years.
Our mission was clear: give organizations the power to understand their communities at a deeper level. Who are their members? What do they care about? And most importantly, how can they serve them better?
Before long, we expanded to serve publishers too.
This gave us a bigger and even more complex playground. Publishers brought different challenges: How do you measure engagement with a 10,000-word research paper? How can you deliver exactly what your audience needs when you’re communicating with authors, reviewers, researchers, students, and laypeople around the globe?
We may not have known exactly what we'd look like five years later, but we knew one thing: data was a North Star. Every decision, every feature, and every long meeting or late night was fueled by the conviction that better data drives better decisions.
…to AI-powered publishing
Behind the curtain, our team was building something that had never existed before: a secure, scholarly-grade AI engine that understood research papers, how they were connected, and how it intersected with realtime human behavior.
In May 2023, we unveiled Alchemist — Hum’s AI-powered intelligence engine.
Over the last two years, we’ve been leveraging AI to dig into the hard problems: How do you understand every paper in the context of your full corpus? How do you maintain trust when algorithms are making recommendations? How do you balance efficiency with the human touch that scholarly publishing demands?
2025: Intelligence, unlocked
In 2025, Hum is no longer just about data. We’re using frontier AI to unlock deep audience and content understanding for publishers.
We've built Alchemist as the orchestration layer that connects AI models to real publishing workflows, handling the complex infrastructure so publishers can focus on what they do best: Advancing science!
Today, Alchemist powers five solutions designed to address the most pressing challenges in scholarly publishing:
- Alchemist Taxonomy: Custom taxonomy and real-time tagging that makes it easier to classify and connect knowledge at scale
- Alchemist Insight: Behavioral intelligence on topics, content, and people powered by fresh first-party data
- Alchemist Engage: Direct audience engagement that helps you orchestrate reader, author, and reviewer journeys in real time
- Alchemist Review: A manuscript intelligence co-pilot that helps your editors streamline peer-review cycles
- Alchemist Search: Search intelligence that delivers answers, not search results
We're just getting started!
Along the way, we’ve learned quite a bit.
What’s next? We're doubling down on frontier AI, pushing past the buzzwords to deliver solutions that make publishers not just more efficient, but genuinely smarter. We're working on problems that didn't exist five years ago, and pioneering solutions for the challenges that will define the next five.
- Every pivot taught us something. From CDP to AI-powered insights, the constant thread has been turning data into meaning. The platform has evolved, the technology has advanced, but the core mission remains: help organizations understand their world better.
- The work never stops evolving—which is good, because neither do we. The publishing world is changing faster than ever. New technologies, new audiences, new challenges around trust, quality, and scale. (Exhilarating!)
- Hum’s community is our compass. Hum wouldn’t be Hum without the people - members, partners, challengers, and clients! - who’ve believed in us, pushed us, and sometimes laughed with us when things broke in beta.
- The future belongs to the curious. The organizations that thrive aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the longest histories. They're the ones willing to ask better questions, try new approaches, and adapt when the world changes around them.