Hemu Qianhang Completes Pre-A+ Round Financing to Build a Next-Gen Software-Defined Experimental Intelligence Technology Platform
VCBeat recently learned that,Shenzhen Cladogram Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Cladogram Technology”) disclosed that it completed its Pre-A+ financing round at the end of 2022. This round was led by a strategic partner, with existing angel investor Xianfeng Changqing and the employee stock ownership platform participating as follow-on investors. The funds raised will be used for the research and development of intelligent laboratory products and technologies in the life sciences and healthcare industries, further team expansion, and strengthening market advantages.。
Cladogram Technology, founded in 2020, leverages its founding team’s extensive expertise in R&D, product development, and commercialization to deeply address the needs of laboratory automation and digitalization through AI-powered robotics and edge cloud computing. Empowering the life sciences and healthcare industries, the company’s business portfolio encompasses core bioprocessing manufacturing equipment, diagnostic and laboratory workstations and assembly lines, and bioinformatics edge computing solutions.
In just two years since its establishment, the company has signed contracts with more than ten listed BioTech benchmark enterprises, providing customers with a variety of intelligent process and diagnostic equipment. This helps customers enhance the intelligence level of their experiments, achieve mutual quality improvement, and accelerate the domestic substitution of equipment within the industry.
The laboratory automation sector emerged in Europe and the United States in the early 21st century, with representative companies including Thermo Fisher Scientific, Beckman Coulter, and Illumina. In the early stages of its development, the primary challenge facing the life sciences and healthcare industries was the need for more microscopic, precise, and convenient tools for experimental observation and measurement. Consequently, the sector initially focused almost exclusively on creating new laboratory instruments by integrating biochemical methodologies with instrumental technologies. After decades of development, the laboratory automation sector has grown substantially in scale. The leading enterprises that achieved significant success through instrument innovation have evolved into industry giants with market capitalizations ranging from tens of billions to hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars.
While rapid advancements in instrument innovation have been achieved, new contradictions within experimental settings are gradually becoming more prominent. Laboratory automation primarily follows two development trajectories: one focuses on enhancing the automated performance of instruments and equipment; the other emphasizes the entire experimental workflow, including manually operated steps such as sample pre-processing, reaction preparation, and reaction setup, as well as data acquisition, organization, and analysis. For a long time, numerous laboratory automation companies have concentrated on improving instrument automation while neglecting other manual experimental processes, which has increasingly constrained industry development. Consequently, in recent years, the concept of "experimental intelligence," which aims to holistically address challenges in experimental scenarios, has gained growing acclaim across the global industry.
With the advancement of biotechnology, market demand for drug development, biomanufacturing, and biological experimentation and testing has surged, drawing increased attention to the intelligent transformation of upstream laboratories. According to a report by VCBeat Institute, the overall penetration rate of smart laboratory construction in China is currently below 20%, leaving a market worth hundreds of billions of yuan untapped and offering broad prospects for future growth.
Smart laboratories leverage key technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, AR/VR, blockchain, and GIS. By integrating hardware devices with software systems, they enhance efficiency, convenience, safety, and compliance across all stages of both dry and wet laboratory operations, thereby achieving cost reduction and improved efficiency. Currently, smart laboratories can be broadly categorized into laboratory automation and laboratory digitalization.
Laboratory automation reduces human intervention by leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling automated experimental procedures and automatic documentation, thereby optimizing experimental workflows and data generation. Laboratory digitalization, on the other hand, is based on big data, cloud computing, and other technologies to integrate and analyze the vast amounts of experiments and data generated in laboratories, establish model algorithms, and optimize experimental and operational processes as well as data applications.
With the advancement of smart laboratories, two distinct development paths are increasingly converging, more comprehensively addressing the diverse experimental needs arising in various business scenarios. Cladogram Technology integrates three major technological systems—Biotechnology (BT), Information Technology (IT), and Automation Technology (AT). Driven by platform-based software technologies, it enables both “macro-process flexibility” and “micro-step flexibility” across the entire laboratory system. By leveraging a data platform to bridge wet and dry experiments, and combining this with an open automated experimental execution system, Cladogram has created a new generation of intelligent life science laboratories based on “software-defined” principles. This approach not only automates individual experimental steps but also endows the system with “perceptive capabilities” through advanced algorithms. The result is an open, highly adaptable, and intelligent technology platform that significantly unleashes the productivity of top-tier talent while enhancing experimental efficiency and quality.
“‘Software-defined’ is the inevitable path toward intelligent experimentation. Previous laboratory automation products in the industry mainly emerged during the 1.0 era of the sector, focusing on addressing specific manual operations at individual points rather than building a technological and product ecosystem from the perspective of holistic intelligence. Consequently, they failed to achieve full-process automation of experimental scenarios and an end-to-end digitalized experimental system. Meanwhile, by collecting structured experimental data through dry labs and establishing a data closed loop with wet labs, it is possible to achieve automation in wet labs and intelligence in dry labs, thereby further improving experimental efficiency and quality,” said Lu Yao, founder of Cladogram Technology.
Experimental intelligence primarily empowers three scenarios: for categories such as drugs, vaccines, and reagentsR&D Scenarios, manufacturing processes for pharmaceuticals, reagents, raw materials, biochips, and other productsBiomanufacturing Scenarios, in the fields of biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and microbiologyDiagnostic Scenario。
Over the past two years, Cladogram Technology has developed two product lines—bioprocess manufacturing and intelligent diagnostics and laboratory solutions—comprehensively covering the three major scenarios of smart laboratories and focusing on two core customer segments: diagnostic institutions and biotech companies.
Currently, in the realm of biomanufacturing process product lines, Cladogram Technology has completed the R&D of products designed for high-precision liquid dispensing and the sealing and assembly of biochips, securing dozens of benchmark clients among publicly listed companies. In the diagnostics and laboratory intelligence product line, Cladogram Technology has developed an intelligent laboratory solution tailored for the molecular diagnostics sector, integrating wet and dry lab workflows to enable fully automated and digitalized operations for molecular diagnostic technologies such as Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). Molecular diagnostics represents one of the most technically demanding, rapidly evolving, and challenging branches within the in vitro diagnostics (IVD) field. Driven by advancements in various detection technologies, including PCR and NGS, and leveraging advantages such as high throughput, high sensitivity, and relatively low unit costs, the applications of molecular diagnostics continue to expand.
Furthermore, Cladogram Technology integrates its digital cloud platform with edge cloud technology, leveraging big data to assist in data analysis and report interpretation, thereby providing clinical and laboratory customers with timely and accurate test results.
Cladogram Technology will primarily focus on two strategic areas: continuing to build life science laboratories that address the needs of three major scenarios, and leveraging bioinformatics and cloud computing technologies to construct a precision medicine service system through end-to-cloud full-chain digitalization.
To date, Cladogram Technology has assembled a team of technical talent from diverse fields including medicine, biology, and AI. Technical and R&D personnel constitute 70% of the company’s workforce, including multiple experts from renowned enterprises such as Huawei, Microsoft, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and BGI.
Lu Yao, Founder of Cladogram TechnologyCladogram Technology stated that it will continue to dedicate itself to the research and development of foundational technologies for experimental intelligence, creating smart life science laboratory solutions geared toward future applications and challenges. Following this round of financing, the company also plans to launch the “Mercury Lab Initiative,” a smart laboratory technology ecosystem designed to attract more partners to join and contribute. The introduction of strategic partners will better enable Cladogram to develop products that meet market demands and facilitate more efficient market expansion.