Limeikang Secures RMB 20 Million in Pre-A Funding to Empower Chain Pharmacies with Integrated 'People-Product-Scene' Solutions

VCBeat has learned that Limikang (Beijing) Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Limikang”) recently completed a RMB 20 million Pre-A financing round, reaching a valuation of RMB 100 million. This round was exclusively invested by Huachen Group, a large comprehensive retailer in Heilongjiang Province. The funds raised will be used for the technical upgrade and iteration of Limikang’s cloud platform, development of pharmacy terminal customers, optimization of supply chain services, as well as the establishment of an upstream pharmaceutical enterprise support service team and a private-domain traffic and community marketing team. Notably, Huachen is also a customer of Limikang; during their collaboration, Huachen recognized the deeper value involved and facilitated further cooperation through this investment.

REMCARE is a cloud-based platform empowering pharmacy operations, dedicated to leveraging information technology to empower small and medium-sized chain pharmacies by comprehensively upgrading “personnel, products, and scenarios.”

Recently, the Department of Comprehensive Administration and Planning & Finance of the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) and the NMPA Information Center released the Annual Statistical Report on Drug Supervision and Administration (2020). The data shows that by the end of 2020, the total number of pharmacies in China (excluding chain enterprises) reached 553,892, with a chain affiliation rate exceeding 56.50%. With the expansion of large pharmacy chains and the rapid development of B2C and O2O businesses, the survival space for small and medium-sized chains and independent pharmacies has been severely squeezed, making transformation and upgrading an urgent imperative.

Based on this, REMCARE has developed a cloud-based platform solution to empower pharmacy operations by leveraging big data and cloud computing technologies. The platform provides tools for member management, product management, personnel management, data management, and marketing, helping pharmacies comprehensively upgrade their staff, inventory, and marketing scenarios, thereby achieving digital transformation for chain pharmacies.

“People”: REMCARE enhances the professional service capabilities of pharmacies through two approaches: an online platform for professional knowledge learning and an AI health consultant.

The online learning platform offers web-based courses and assessments on medical knowledge of common diseases and pharmaceutical expertise, featuring automated credit tracking and professional competency evaluation. It also implements a credit-based incentive program to effectively boost store staff’s enthusiasm for learning, thereby enhancing their professional capability in providing pharmaceutical care.

REMCARE’s self-developed AI Health Advisor delivers intelligent pharmaceutical services and medication process management, while providing smart, long-term care solutions for patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. It offers comprehensive AI-driven chronic disease management, covering medication adherence, dietary control, exercise planning, and complication prevention.

“Pharmacy staff enhance their professional capabilities through continuous learning on the REMCARE platform, enabling them to provide customers with more effective medication regimens. The empowerment by AI health consultants facilitates long-term efficacy management for customers after they leave the store. REMCARE helps pharmacies deliver greater professional value to customers, striking a balance between patient treatment outcomes and corporate profits, thereby boosting customer recognition and loyalty,” said Yin Dongyu, founder of REMCARE.

““Goods”: REMCARE has partnered with over a hundred chain pharmacies to jointly establish the “Joint Procurement and Sales Cloud Platform,” leveraging supply chain optimization services to help pharmacies reduce procurement costs and diversify their product portfolios.

Regarding the pharmaceutical and health products currently forming the core business of partner pharmacies, REMCARE helps them rapidly reduce procurement costs and increase sales gross margins through strategies such as private-label self-operation of incremental products and volume-based centralized procurement of best-selling branded items.

Meanwhile, to align with the broader industry trend of declining profit margins in pharmaceutical sales and the urgent need for diversified transformation in the pharmacy sector, REMCARE has established a dedicated non-pharmaceutical supply chain based on community marketing that is not subject to medical insurance policy restrictions. This initiative helps pharmacies broaden their category structure, expanding from the current “Pharmaceuticals and Health” category—dominated by Chinese and Western proprietary medicines, health supplements, and medical devices—to the “Healthy Living” category, focused on personal care, home care, and sports health, and further extending into the “Quality Life” category, centered on health foods, geographically indicated fruits and vegetables, and specialty foods.

Yin Dongyu stated, “Beyond optimizing the structure and profitability of core product categories, helping pharmacies expand their category mix—by gradually transitioning from low-frequency, passive sales to high-frequency, proactive engagement—holds more profound significance.”

“Scene”: REMCARE empowers pharmacies to enhance in-store shopping experiences through CRM, while leveraging stores as traffic entry points to build private-domain traffic pools, thereby facilitating community-based marketing and social e-commerce for pharmacies.

REMCARE guides pharmacy staff to enhance customer experience through value-driven approaches, while providing pharmacies with a strongly connected, high-engagement, automated CRM system and comprehensive solutions for member acquisition and marketing throughout the entire customer lifecycle. By streamlining processes, REMCARE establishes multiple touchpoints with customers during a single member acquisition interaction, enabling multi-channel engagement via merchant accounts, service accounts, WeChat groups, and other platforms. This helps pharmacies rapidly reduce marketing costs and improve marketing effectiveness. Leveraging advanced demand algorithms and automated tag management, REMCARE creates multi-dimensional customer profiles to enable precision marketing, assisting pharmacies in boosting user conversion rates, engagement, and lifetime value.

“Upgrading sales scenarios will break through the bottlenecks of offline business, extending from a single in-store scenario to build a private domain traffic pool. This transforms the disadvantage of limited offline traffic compared to extensive online traffic into an advantage by creating entry points for private domain traffic. It reshapes service and marketing scenarios that integrate in-store and out-of-store, as well as offline and online channels, enabling communication and connection with customers across time and space. By implementing systematic and automated operational solutions for community marketing and social e-commerce, it opens up vast new business opportunities for pharmacies,” said Yin Dongyu, founder of REMCARE.

REMCARE facilitates connections between upstream pharmaceutical manufacturers and chain pharmacies already partnered with the platform. By introducing competitive products, REMCARE provides data-driven distribution management and proactive inventory management upon authorization from pharmacy terminals, thereby completing B2B collaboration. Additionally, through REMCARE’s learning platform, pharmaceutical manufacturers can conduct online product knowledge training for pharmacy staff. Upon authorization from pharmacies, manufacturers can access store-level and staff-level sales data to analyze issues and uncover potential, enabling precise To-S (store and staff) terminal maintenance and sales promotion support.

Furthermore, REMCARE helps pharmaceutical companies identify target customers with precise needs through customer profiling and data filtering. Upon authorization from pharmacies, it can directly promote to consumers (To C) by sending product promotional articles, health assessments, and patient education videos, thereby achieving precise customer acquisition. After customers purchase products, the REMCARE system automatically provides medication guidance to enhance perceived efficacy, manages medication cycles to improve adherence, and re-engages chronic disease patients who have not repurchased after long intervals, thus realizing automated customer retention management.

Yin Dongyu believes that “under the major trend of separation between medical services and pharmaceutical sales, along with the outflow of prescriptions, pharmaceutical companies will place greater emphasis on marketing and promotion through pharmacy channels. The aforementioned SFA system services hold significant potential in the pharmaceutical industry’s F-end market.”

Yin Dongyu, Founder and CEO of REMCARE, has dedicated 18 years to the pharmaceutical industry, accumulating profound industry insights, extensive practical experience, and broad professional networks. Currently responsible for REMCARE’s overall strategic development and comprehensive operational management, Mr. Yin is also a successful serial entrepreneur. In 2014, he founded Pharmex Management Consulting, which has grown into one of China’s most professional and fastest-growing management consulting firms in the pharmaceutical sector. Its multiple advisory teams provide pharmacy channel strategy and marketing consultation to numerous listed pharmaceutical companies, as well as long-term operational coaching to various pharmacy chains. To date, eight chain pharmacies with annual sales exceeding RMB 100 million have voluntarily granted 10–20% equity stakes to the Pharmex team, with the total valuation of these gifted equity interests surpassing RMB 100 million.

REMCARE’s core team consists of industry practitioners with over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical-grade chain pharmacy sector, possessing profound insights and extensive expertise in both the pharmaceutical industry and the industrial internet. “Our core team members are seasoned professionals who have been deeply engaged in the pharmacy industry for more than a decade, bringing rich experience and resources to the fields of pharmaceutical e-commerce and mobile health. It is precisely this deep understanding of the industry that enables us to continuously launch products and services aligned with real-world scenarios and genuine needs, thereby providing truly valuable empowerment support to our partner enterprises.” Notably, every product and service offered by REMCARE is first piloted in its self-operated chain pharmacies before being rolled out to partner companies.

Currently, REMCARE has two cooperation models with chain pharmacies: one is a paid model, and the other involves establishing joint ventures controlled by REMCARE to jointly manage member assets. Since its launch in July 2020, REMCARE has partnered with over 90 chain pharmacy companies, covering more than 3,000 stores. The sales volume through these partnered terminals has reached RMB 6.7 billion, serving over 12 million end consumers, among whom strong, multi-dimensional connections have been established with more than 4 million customers.

REMCARE has established four clear commercial monetization models, demonstrating strong profitability conversion capabilities.

First, chain pharmacies pay service fees for the cloud payment platform. REMCARE provides comprehensive services for the upgrade and reshaping of “people, products, and premises,” with a plan to achieve annual SaaS service fee revenue of RMB 20 million by 2025.

Second, upstream pharmaceutical companies pay cloud platform service fees, while REMCARE provides B-to-S-to-C SFA services—with a plan to partner with 100 pharmaceutical companies by 2025, achieving an annual GMV of RMB 5 billion and service fee income of RMB 250 million.

Third, sales profit-sharing in the pharmacy supply chain optimization business—planning to reach 500 private-label and volume-based procurement products by 2025, achieving annual sales of RMB 10 billion and profits of RMB 500 million.

Fourth, jointly conduct non-pharmaceutical community marketing and social e-commerce profit-sharing with pharmacies—planning to create 100 self-operated blockbuster products and distribute 100 selected blockbuster products by 2025, achieving annual sales of RMB 20 billion and profits of RMB 2 billion.

It is understood that REMCARE plans to serve 60,000 high-quality stores and closely connect with 200 million end consumers in 2025.

Huachen Group, established in 1996, is a modern, large-scale private conglomerate that has grown locally in Heilongjiang Province. It is diversified, comprehensive, and operates across multiple industries and regions. Over the past 25 years, through continuous expansion, reform, innovation, and development, the group now comprises ten major business sectors and more than 20 subsidiaries, including Huachen Department Store, Huachen Chain Supermarkets, Huachen Chain Pharmacies, Nuojie Pharmaceutical Company, Huachen Home Appliance Store, Jiuyuan Real Estate Development, Tiansheng Construction and Installation, Logistics and Distribution Center, Huachen Property Management Company, and Huachen Pawnshop Company. Its market presence covers more than 30 key cities and counties throughout Heilongjiang Province, including Suihua, Harbin, Qiqihar, Mudanjiang, Daqing, Heihe, and Yichun. The group currently holds total assets exceeding RMB 5 billion, employs over 7,000 staff members, directly supports more than 10,000 merchants, and facilitates employment for over 50,000 people. With annual operating revenue surpassing RMB 3 billion and annual tax contributions reaching RMB 200 million, Huachen Group, under the leadership of Chairman and General Manager Feng Shaochen, has remained rooted in its local community. Through dedication and strategic vision, it has written a commercial legend, achieved remarkable performance, built a strong brand image, earned widespread social acclaim, and made outstanding contributions to economic and social development.