iNeuro Secures Strategic Investment from TalkingData Capital to Advance AI-Powered EEG Solutions

Hangzhou Niunuo Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as iNEURO), a company specializing in EEG solutions for neuroscience, recently announced the completion of its investment closing with TalkingData Capital. VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that this round constitutes a strategic investment, with Tan Capital serving as the exclusive financial advisor. The funds raised by iNEURO will be utilized for business expansion, technological development, and brand building of its EEG hardware and software products. Meanwhile, TalkingData will continue to collaborate with iNEURO in the realm of data intelligence, supporting its development and exploring new application scenarios and value propositions for medical data.

How Large Is the EEG Market? Nationwide, there are only slightly more than 600 certified intermediate-level EEG technicians. These professionals are concentrated in top-tier tertiary hospitals, remaining far removed from primary care settings, where a large number of patients are actually located.

To address the allocation of such extreme resource disparities, the state has implemented a hospital trusteeship policy, under which a large tertiary Grade A hospital oversees 30–40 primary care hospitals. This arrangement means that neurologists, already in short supply, must frequently travel among various primary care institutions, posing significant challenges to their energy levels and capacity to manage patient volumes.

Driven by such critical demands, iNEURO has developed an EEG cloud platform dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders. This platform is compatible with mainstream EEG devices, structuring and digitizing EEG data on the cloud to enable AI-based preliminary screening and remote consultation. With this EEG cloud platform, neurologists no longer need to spend significant time and effort conducting on-site consultations at primary care hospitals. Instead, they can remotely interpret and analyze EEG signals from a central EEG center once the operating physicians at grassroots facilities upload the data to the cloud system, thereby significantly enhancing diagnostic and therapeutic efficiency.

Data is the core competitiveness of every artificial intelligence enterprise. Through its cloud platform, iNEURO leverages big data to provide health risk assessments for patients while continuously optimizing its algorithms to develop more precise EEG processing models.

AI’s Journey in EEG Exploration Is Still UnderwayDai Shenyi, CEO of iNEURO, stated, “Currently, iNeuro has achieved automated preliminary screening of positive EEG data, effectively improving the efficiency of EEG interpretation for physicians. However, AI needs to advance into the realm of deeper learning to analyze and deconstruct positive EEG data in relation to specific disease entities. This requires sustained efforts from both clinical experts and algorithm engineers. Particularly, as standardized guidelines for EEG diagnosis and treatment are still being developed, and EEG application scenarios continue to expand—for instance, we are currently initiating a pilot program for establishing a national-level clinical EEG database. Through collaborative pilots involving medical teams from six top-tier hospitals, we aim to identify and discuss early-stage challenges encountered during the setup process, thereby establishing a universally applicable and mutually beneficial mechanism for database sharing. Recently, we have expanded the application of EEG from neurology to critical care medicine, neurosurgery, and other specialties, which will further clarify the use cases for EEG technology.”

Despite various practical clinical challenges, this AI-powered EEG preliminary screening system has significantly expanded the application scenarios for EEG products. Previously, it took neurologists nearly three hours to analyze a patient’s 24-hour EEG recording; with the assistance of iNEURO’s EEG AI, this time has been reduced to just 15 minutes, greatly improving physicians’ efficiency and enabling more patients to benefit from the technology.

Regarding the now widely adopted scenario of EEG monitoring in ICUs, Dai Shenyi candidly stated, “During the initial product design and R&D phases, we did not anticipate that the ICU would become such a critical area of demand. Due to a shortage of specialized EEG physicians in ICUs, departments lack sufficient medical capacity to process patients’ brainwave data in real time. However, effective continuous EEG monitoring can significantly improve patients’ survival rates and the likelihood of neurological recovery, which is vital for ICU departments. We identified this use case through our exploratory efforts. Today, our product has been deployed in numerous leading hospitals. For instance, we have recently established a comprehensive, in-depth collaboration with the ICU at West China Hospital, where both parties will jointly refine the AI-driven expert decision-support system for EEG, providing ICU physicians with more advanced patient monitoring solutions.”

Driven by the goal of addressing market needs, iNEURO has pursued a dual hardware and software design strategy centered around EEG technology across its product line. Dai Shenyi explained to VCBeat reporters, “Initially, we focused solely on software development. However, we encountered numerous challenges during data acquisition. First, discrepancies among acquisition devices led to inconsistent EEG data collection. Second, many portable scenarios hold significant application value, yet numerous manufacturers have overlooked this demand. Third, EEG data must undergo multiple algorithmic transformations to eliminate interference and generate analyzable signals. Capturing signals associated with specific feature values requires a deep understanding of micro-signal processing, which inevitably demands thorough comprehension of the underlying hardware.”

Driven by multiple factors, iNEURO has expanded its product line to focus on electroencephalograph (EEG) devices. The company has not only introduced AI-powered EEG systems into hospitals but also developed portable and wearable EEG devices tailored for smaller-scale settings.

The ENS-2124U medical electroencephalograph (EEG) developed by iNEURO is currently the only EEG device certified by the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) that utilizes a 24-bit sampling precision chip. Designed for medium-to-large healthcare institutions, health management companies, and community service centers, this EEG system supports routine EEG, 72-hour ambulatory monitoring, video-EEG recording and playback, as well as long-term EEG monitoring.

Portable EEG devices serve as interfaces connecting communities, physician groups, and cloud platforms, enabling the centralized upload of daily monitoring data to the EEG cloud platform. After professional physicians generate reports, the data is transmitted back to hospitals, elderly care communities, primary healthcare service centers, physical examination institutions, and other relevant entities.

The headband-style EEG monitor enables comprehensive, uninterrupted monitoring and storage of EEG parameters for over 8 hours during mobile activities. Weighing only 100g, it allows for on-demand EEG signal detection via smartphones or tablets at any time.

The aforementioned equipment enables diagnosis and early warning for conditions such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, viral encephalitis, cerebrovascular diseases, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Notably, the incidence of epilepsy is as high as 8 per 1,000 individuals. Electroencephalography (EEG) serves as the gold standard for epilepsy diagnosis, with a market size exceeding RMB 26.4 billion. By integrating iNEURO’s AI algorithms and cloud platform, diagnostic accuracy for these conditions has reached exceptionally high levels, achieving algorithm sensitivity of over 80% and specificity exceeding 90%.

Currently, iNEURO’s products have been deployed in over 40 hospitals, including top-tier institutions with first-class neurology departments such as Beijing Tiantan Hospital, Shanghai Huashan Hospital, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and West China Hospital. In collaboration with multiple expert teams, the company has jointly applied for numerous national and provincial/ministerial-level research projects, with multiple papers in top international journals expected to be published during the course of these studies. To date, iNEURO has secured nearly 20 patents and copyrights related to EEG-based diagnosis, establishing a robust technological barrier.

Meanwhile, iNEURO’s team comprises not only senior technical experts but also a large number of researchers with strong scientific capabilities, enabling collaborative R&D with physicians on research projects. This has helped iNEURO build an extensive network of physicians and hospitals, accelerating the commercialization of its related products.

The ICU will be the next key focus area for iNEURO. On November 17, 2018, the launch ceremony of the collaboration between iNEURO and the Department of Critical Care Medicine at West China Hospital of Sichuan University was held in Chengdu. According to the announcement, both parties will leverage their respective strengths to jointly develop a (rapid) brain function assessment system for critically ill patients, aimed at evaluating brain function and conducting data mining in this population, thereby addressing the current pain points and challenges associated with the clinical application of EEG in the ICU.

Both scenarios and technologies continue to evolve through ongoing exploration. In the future, iNEURO will persist in exploring new business pathways, deepening collaborations with pharmaceutical and health examination companies, leveraging AI capabilities to assist in the R&D of drugs for epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, and other related conditions, and promoting the adoption of EEG technology in broader primary healthcare settings to truly make high-tech innovations universally accessible. Additionally, neuroscience is one of the key focus areas for Probes Capital. Approaching from both diagnostic and therapeutic dimensions, Probes Capital has systematically served multiple well-known enterprises in this field, providing various value-added services through its post-investment management department and facilitating business collaborations among its portfolio companies.

TalkingData Capital, the industrial investment fund under TalkingData, identifies medical technology as one of its key investment focuses. As a leading third-party data intelligence service provider in China, TalkingData possesses extensive big data resources and robust structured data processing capabilities. Centered on its data middle platform and supported by software and data services, the company leverages years of experience in deploying data intelligence solutions to deliver valuable data management, marketing, and consulting services to enterprises across numerous industries.