VizumAI Secures Tens of Millions of RMB in Series A Funding, Advances Ophthalmic AI Solutions

Recently, Vistel (Beijing Zhiyuan Huitu Technology Co., Ltd.), a leading domestic AI medical imaging enterprise, disclosed its latest financing progress to VCBeat. This round of funding was led by Danlu Capital, with the disclosed amount reaching tens of millions of RMB. The raised funds will be used for the research, development, and implementation of AI products in the field of ophthalmology.

Vistel, founded in August 2016 by former Intel executives and researchers, has targeted ophthalmology as its entry point into AI-driven healthcare since its inception.

“Among the 110 million diabetic patients in China, approximately 30 million suffer from diabetic retinopathy. Each diabetic patient should undergo an average of 1–2 examinations per year, representing a substantial medical demand. I believe AI has significant potential in this field, which is why I founded Vistel,” said founder Sun Yuhui.

It is not only diabetic retinopathy; annually, 180 million hypertensive patients across China require follow-up to determine the presence of hypertensive retinopathy, 200 million individuals aged over 60 need screening for age-related macular degeneration, and more than 40 million patients with high myopia require evaluation to rule out pathologic myopia.

In stark contrast to the immense clinical demand is the severe shortage of ophthalmologists. Nationwide, there are only 32,000 ophthalmologists, 30% of whom are ENT specialists. Furthermore, there are fewer than 3,000 specialists in fundus diseases and fewer than 400 glaucoma specialists, with these professionals predominantly concentrated in core hospitals within major cities.

The annual demand for objective screening, amounting to hundreds of millions of visits, is significantly mismatched with the mere thousands of ophthalmologists available, both in terms of quantity and geographic distribution. Under such circumstances, we either suppress the screening needs of these hundreds of millions, thereby leading to an increasingly heavy healthcare burden in the future, or we leverage technological means to multiply physicians’ work efficiency by several-fold or even tens of-fold. Clearly, the latter presents an opportunity for artificial intelligence to demonstrate its value.

Healthcare is a systematic engineering endeavor, where standalone software offers limited value to clients. Vistel provides not just medical AI software, but comprehensive industry solutions addressing various healthcare pain points. After more than two years of research and development, Vistel has established collaborative research partnerships with multiple top-tier hospitals.

Specifically, Vistel offers a diabetic retinopathy screening solution for the detection of diabetic retinopathy; a multi-disease ophthalmic screening solution for various common fundus lesions; and an ophthalmic PACS solution designed to enhance the level of informatization in ophthalmology. The comprehensive solutions are highly targeted and flexible, fully meeting customers' personalized needs.

EyeWisdom-Based Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Solution^®Centered on the DSS software, this solution achieves a sensitivity of over 90% in screening for diabetic retinopathy, making it Vistel’s most mature offering.

EyeWisdom: Multi-Disease Ophthalmic Screening Solution^®Centered on the MCS software, the system can detect retinal vascular abnormalities, optic nerve abnormalities, and macular abnormalities in patients based on color fundus photographs, delivering results from image analysis in just 10 seconds.

Ophthalmic PACS Solution enables interoperability among various ophthalmic medical imaging and measurement devices, allowing ophthalmologists to better manage patients' image and text data, thereby improving medical efficiency and reducing medical disputes. Additionally, the ophthalmic PACS supports remote diagnosis functionality.

When it comes to the application of AI in medical imaging, most people’s first thought is AI-assisted diagnosis. However, Vistel’s products go beyond diagnosis to also perform lesion detection and quantitative lesion analysis. Such innovations may bring greater clinical value to healthcare providers.

AI computer vision technologies primarily focus on four areas: first, image classification, which involves making disease diagnoses based on images; second, image recognition, which enables the automatic identification of lesions or regions of interest in medical images; third, image segmentation, which allows for the automatic delineation of the boundaries of lesions or regions of interest; and fourth, image retrieval and tracking.

Constrained by the underlying algorithms of artificial intelligence (AI), although AI software can make diagnoses based on medical imaging, it cannot explain the rationale behind its diagnostic conclusions to physicians. In other industries, as long as AI-driven decisions are reasonably accurate, the lack of interpretability may not pose a significant problem. However, in the rigorous field of healthcare, the absence of interpretability is an unavoidable challenge. Given the critical nature of medical practice, relying on an unexplainable AI diagnosis often leaves physicians feeling uncertain and insecure. To address this limitation, Vistel has conducted extensive research in image recognition technology, successfully mitigating the industry-wide challenge of lacking interpretability in AI-based diagnostic conclusions to a certain extent.

Furthermore, for physicians, making a qualitative diagnosis does not signify the end of the diagnostic process; in addition to qualitative assessment, quantitative measurements are sometimes required. Vistel’s image recognition and image segmentation technologies can precisely identify lesions in medical images, delineate their boundaries, and automatically calculate lesion area and volume. Through such quantitative techniques, the application scope of AI software can extend from diagnosis to treatment efficacy evaluation and prognosis assessment.

“Technologically, we have expanded diagnostics from qualitative assessment to quantitative analysis; in terms of product offerings, we have evolved from selling software to providing comprehensive solutions for our clients. Healthcare consumption is not impulsive; only products that truly create value for customers possess lasting viability,” said Sun Yuhui.

Danlu Capital stated that the next few years will witness rapid development in China’s smart healthcare infrastructure. Currently, the AI medical imaging sector is highly crowded, with participants ranging from the AI imaging divisions of listed ophthalmology companies and star startups backed by renowned institutions to AI healthcare products developed by internet giants. Nevertheless, Danlu Capital remains optimistic about Vistel’s growth prospects. This confidence stems from Vistel’s technology-driven DNA and its substantial, accumulated data assets, which will enable the company to gain a competitive edge in this fiercely contested market.

“AI in healthcare is a technology-driven field, where accuracy is the key factor determining how far a product can go. The executive team of Vistel comes from Tsinghua University and Intel backgrounds. Their relentless pursuit of accuracy and speed enables the company’s AI products to analyze fundus images, annotate lesion data, and generate diagnostic reports within 10 seconds.”

“Vistel has trained its AI models on over one million fundus images, resulting in high-accuracy AI products. It is reported that Vistel’s AI products boast substantial training data volumes and impressive accuracy rates, with feedback from multiple Grade 3A hospitals indicating that their diagnostic accuracy reaches the level of ophthalmology experts. Furthermore, the Vistel team demonstrates strong execution capabilities and has made rapid progress in product development. The company’s AI-based fundus examination product is currently undergoing CE (European Union) certification and simultaneously applying for registration as a Class III medical device with the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), with clinical progress exceeding expectations,” stated Danlu Capital.

Currently, Vistel has established four R&D centers in Beijing, Nanjing, Xi’an, and Guangzhou, with its related products successfully deployed in over 100 hospitals. This number continues to grow. In the coming year, Vistel will launch additional product lines to provide more refined solutions to the challenges faced by ophthalmologists.