Dual-Core Growth Strategy Navigates the 'Winter': Opportunities and Challenges in the Greater Health Commercial Ecosystem

Robots performing the yangge dance on the Spring Festival Gala stage, the DeepSeek large language model capable of deep reasoning, and wearable bionic hands enabling “mind control”… Over the past six months, these cutting-edge products and their creators—the “Hangzhou Six Little Dragons”—have become a societal phenomenon, marking a qualitative leap in technological innovation in Hangzhou and even Zhejiang Province, transitioning from quantitative accumulation to qualitative breakthrough.

At the 9th All Things Growth Conference recently held in Hangzhou, a new cohort of outstanding emerging forces emerged: the conference pioneered the concept of “Seed Unicorns,” focusing on new quality productive forces in sectors such as artificial intelligence, healthcare, and the digital economy, to identify high-quality sci-tech innovation enterprises and release the “Seed Unicorn” list.

The life and health companies on the list are predominantly hard-tech enterprises focused on innovative drugs and medical devices, as well as innovative medical materials, among whichKNOTRIX, a company primarily engaged in the operation of a digital and intelligent content ecosystem for general health, stands out remarkably. This highlights the significant value that KNOTRIX and the pharmaceutical and general health content industry bring to accelerating the development of new channels for the commercialization of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

2025 VBEF KNOTRIX Exhibition Area

In the vast health and wellness market, social media platforms have emerged as new channels, with content-driven e-commerce rising rapidly and significant room for further penetration.

The latest Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), indicates that social networking applications have become the primary channel for internet users to access information. As of December 2024, the number of social network users in China reached 1.101 billion, accounting for 99.3% of the total internet population. With the rapid advancement of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, increasingly detailed user profiles can be generated.

Over the past two years, major social media platforms have gradually opened up sales channels for pharmaceutical and medical device products, prioritizing safety and regulatory compliance, thereby creating new commercial entry points for the pharmaceutical and broader healthcare industry.On social media platforms, the pharmaceutical and broader healthcare industry aims to build a closed loop that spans from content creation to precise user engagement and ultimately to sales conversion.

Opportunities and challenges emerge simultaneously, with several sets of contradictory relationships becoming increasingly prominent:

Users expect to obtain professional health knowledge from social media platforms, but the quality of content across these platforms varies significantly, making it difficult for users to distinguish between high- and low-quality information;

Physicians and other healthcare professionals possess the capability to produce specialized content and the willingness to expand their personal influence; however, due to heavy offline workloads, they lack the time to learn or utilize various content creation tools, resulting in limited research into personal brand positioning and the dissemination dynamics of social media platforms.

The massive traffic on social platforms has led pharmaceutical and medical device companies to increasingly value the influence of word-of-mouth in directly reaching consumers. They are eager to precisely and efficiently connect with target users to influence their purchasing decisions. However, they face challenges such as high customer acquisition costs and the long time required to build user trust. Additionally, the ever-changing rules of major platforms necessitate continuous adjustments to marketing strategies.

The interplay of these contradictions has spurred the emergence of a cohort of content ecosystem operation platforms; however, after several years of intense market consolidation, only a handful of companies have survived.In the era where “traffic is king,” many MCN agencies have adopted a short-sighted monetization strategy: recklessly chasing or manufacturing hype, rapidly building accounts at low cost, and then immediately pivoting to e-commerce livestreaming to make quick money. However, such traffic surges as quickly as it fades. Meanwhile, the digital-intelligent content ecosystem operation platform for the big health industryKNOTRIX adheres to the principle of “content is king,” creating value for doctors, health influencers, pharmaceutical and medical device brands, users, and other stakeholders. By deeply integrating into the broader healthcare market and opening up new growth avenues through emerging channels, it has forged a steady and sustainable path of development.

According to reports, KNOTRIX has collaborated with over 3,000 health and wellness IP partners, including more than 260 self-incubated medical and health IPs, achieving coverage across all clinical specialties.

In the process of co-creating patient education and science popularization content with physician IPs, KNOTRIX always prioritizes scientific rigor and professionalism. It strictly selects physicians from tertiary hospitals or above, while its collaborating health influencers possess professional backgrounds in fields such as rehabilitation therapy, nutrition, and exercise training. Furthermore, KNOTRIX has established a professional content team that provides end-to-end content production—including planning, filming, editing, and operations—based on insights into social media dissemination characteristics. The professionalism of the content is reviewed by physicians and health influencers, ensuring that high-quality, professional content reaches a wider audience.

An orthopedic surgeon skilled at integrating patient education into songs, accompanied by follow-along exercises, co-created short videos such as Cervical Spine Exercises, Joint Health Song, and Lumbar Spine Song with KNOTRIX. These videos garnered nearly 6 billion total views due to their accessibility, simplicity, and practicality. KNOTRIX also incubated the leading postpartum rehabilitation IP @XiaoWangRehab, which has accumulated nearly 6 million highly engaged niche followers across major platforms through professional and accessible postpartum care educational short videos and over 1,800 free live-streamed Kegel exercise sessions.

To date, KNOTRIX produces over 100,000 pieces of original content annually that combine professional rigor with broad appeal, achieving more than 35 billion views across all platforms each year.

In the view of Ding Zhaoliang (Danggui), Founder and CEO of KNOTRIX, the new business ecosystem places greater emphasis on comprehensive service capabilities. In the context of the broader health and wellness ecosystem, service providers must not only be proficient in content, traffic, and data but also master the key elements of commercialization.

Leveraging its meticulously curated content, KNOTRIX continues to explore pathways for commercial monetization by establishing four core business pillars: precision marketing for medical content, a live-streaming matrix featuring health influencers, end-to-end partnerships for home-use medical devices, and refined operations of its self-owned brands. By developing systematic conversion strategies tailored to the needs of specific niche audiences, KNOTRIX enables brands to reach their target users with high efficiency and precision. To date, KNOTRIX has partnered with over 1,000 brands, driving more than RMB 2 billion in GMV growth for its partners.

Precision Marketing in the Greater Health Sector Must Establish a Closed Loop from Content to Sales Conversion; Weak Links in Key Stages Cannot Be Overlooked.

First, content production is heavily reliant on manpower; with limited human resources, it is difficult to balance quality and efficiency. It also depends significantly on individual experience or style, making it challenging to effectively replicate successful content production methodologies.

Second, there is a lack of robust evidence supporting the link between content and user behavior or consumer decision-making. For instance, what are the key elements in a short video’s copy, background music, and speech rate that resonate with users and drive likes, shares, or comments? When users make purchase decisions, which pieces of information they have previously received exert a direct impact on those decisions?

Historically, content operation data reports or post-campaign marketing summaries have been able to address these issues to some extent, drawing inferences that provide reference for subsequent operational or marketing efforts. Their limitation lies in the fact that, although manual analysis can be conducted with the aid of information technology tools, the analytical dimensions are limited and the granularity is relatively coarse; consequently, the resulting conclusions offer only framework-level guidance for follow-up work.

In recent years, the rapid development of digital-intelligent technologies has triggered profound industrial transformations and offered superior solutions to many shortcomings in precision marketing within the big health sector.

In terms of content production, the dual enhancement of quality and efficiency has become possible with the support of digital intelligence.For instance, KNOTRIX independently developed the “CHEESECAKE Copywriting Output Platform,” which specializes in the broader health sector. The platform captures trending topics to precisely plan content themes, efficiently generates scripts by emulating the styles of key opinion leaders, and combines this with manual oversight to ensure strict quality control throughout the entire process.

Since 2025, the emergence of large AI models has accelerated the process of digital and intelligent transformation. In the field of precision marketing for healthcare and wellness, massive amounts of content and content dissemination data, user behavior data, and sales conversion data have been generated and continue to grow rapidly.By conducting “real-world studies” on massive amounts of data related to general health content, digital intelligence yields comprehensive “real-world evidence,” whose implications for content production and marketing decisions are boundless.

Still taking content production as an example, in March 2025, the first phase of the KOL-AI large language model, jointly developed by KNOTRIX and the research team from Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, was completed. By assigning values to factors such as video background music, text length, and visual color schemes, the model analyzes their correlation with various performance metrics of videos, including views, reposts, and comments. Once deployed, it will provide precise digital and intelligent guidance for high-quality content creation, reducing reliance on empirical experience in content production.

In the realm of precision marketing, KNOTRIX has recently entered into a strategic partnership with London Business School to develop a large-scale evaluation model based on the “content dissemination–product search volume–commercial conversion value” framework. This model analyzes the complete logical pathway from health content dissemination to consumer decision-making, thereby providing more scientifically grounded guidance for the formulation of marketing strategies.

KNOTRIX Digital Intelligence Technology-Enabled Business Growth Model

Of course, beyond addressing existing challenges on a case-by-case basis, digital intelligence will also achieve systematic and deep integration with the industry. Tomorrow, at the 2025 VBEF Top 100 Exhibition hosted by VCBeat, Ding Zhaoliang (Dang Gui) will attend the main forum and deliver a keynote speech titled “Digital Intelligence Empowerment, Content Value Addition: Strategies for Innovating the ‘People-Product-Place’ Ecosystem in General Health.” He will share insights on evolving trends in medical and general health products, new market opportunities brought by new media, and how KNOTRIX enables “high-quality content” and “digital intelligence technologies” to work synergistically, helping partner brands achieve more efficient commercial conversion.

The development of social media platforms and the support of emerging technologies have made the vast prospects of the big health market inevitable.

With the comprehensive advancement of various healthcare reform measures, the landscape of the pharmaceutical and medical device distribution market is being reshaped, and the share of the out-of-hospital market is growing.

Recent forecast data released by Menet shows that in 2024, sales revenue in the public hospital terminal pharmaceutical market decreased by 3.5% year-on-year, while the retail pharmacy terminal (including brick-and-mortar and online pharmacies) increased by 3.7% year-on-year.

National policies also comprehensively encourage innovative supply in health consumption.In 2025, the Government Work Report assigned key tasks to vigorously boost consumption. In the field of general health, twelve departments, including the Ministry of Commerce and the National Health Commission, issued the Special Action Plan for Promoting Health Consumption.It is required to cultivate and develop new quality productive forces in the health consumption sector, improve the quality of supply of health-related goods and services, and create new business formats, models, and scenarios.

However, for innovative enterprises, only by possessing the ability to weather economic cycles can they have the confidence to pursue development amid the global capital winter.VBInsight stated in the “2024 Global Healthcare Investment and Financing Analysis Report” that, to reduce uncertainty, mature companies with steady growth are more favored by investment institutions.

In the content ecosystem of the broader health and wellness sector, an enterprise’s ability to provide systematic solutions, along with its financial growth performance and value of industrial synergy, serves as a key criterion for investors in assessing whether a project possesses deterministic value.

In this sector, KNOTRIX has emerged as one of the companies frequently securing capital investment during the “winter.” Notably, it closed two financing rounds within a single month and officially completed its A+ round, raising tens of millions of yuan, in April this year.

KNOTRIX’s Financing History, Source: Public Reports

In 2025, KNOTRIX repositioned itself from a “comprehensive health content ecosystem operations platform” to a “digital-intelligent comprehensive health content ecosystem operations platform,” establishing a core growth system driven by the dual engines of “digital-intelligent technology” and “high-quality content”—a model that has been affirmed by Zhu Yong, Director of the Department of E-Commerce and Informatization under the Ministry of Commerce.

Director of the E-Commerce and Informatization Department of the Ministry of Commerce, Zhu Yong, Conducts Research Visit to KNOTRIX

“Innovative enterprises also face differing considerations from investors regarding capitalization or industrial synergy,” said Ding Zhaoliang (Danggui). KNOTRIX possesses strengths in both areas.

In 2024, KNOTRIX achieved rapid revenue growth, with precision marketing for medical content increasing by 108% year-over-year and full-link collaborations for home-use medical devices rising by 100% year-over-year.Robust self-sustaining capabilities enable companies to withstand the “winter” of the broader economic environment and deliver financial returns to investors more rapidly.

Among KNOTRIX’s investors are prominent venture capital firms, individual investors, and healthcare industry investors. In addition to attracting financial investors, KNOTRIX has the capability to collaborate with strategic industry investors. In January 2025, KNOTRIX secured a multi-million-yuan investment from Cofoe Medical, with both parties agreeing to engage in deep cooperation across areas such as industry research, brand marketing, market expansion, and industrial partnerships.

Furthermore, KNOTRIX’s inclusion in the “Zhejiang Seed Unicorn Enterprises” list, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, serves as further validation of its definite investment value.

Overall, the broader health industry is poised to unlock another wave of dividends, driven by innovations in channels, business models, and technologies. While many “cutting-edge” hard-tech enterprises have already captured public attention, innovative companies that integrate soft content capabilities with hard technological prowess also hold unique value and are even set to profoundly shape industry transformation.