Baidu Invests in Youlai Doctor to Accelerate Expansion in the Health Sector

Recently, Baidu led the Series B financing round for Youlai Doctor, an internet-based health science popularization platform, with a funding scale of nearly RMB 200 million.

According to official information from Youlai Doctor, the platform focuses on health science popularization and physician operations, empowering doctors through internet, big data, and artificial intelligence technologies to produce and distribute health education content across all online channels. Currently, Youlai Doctor has partnered with more than 30,000 physicians from over 3,000 public hospitals nationwide, established 100 health science popularization film and television bases across China, and built a training faculty pool and a professional physician operations team. It provides doctors with platforms for creating and sharing educational content, conducts systematic training in science popularization, and enhances physicians’ capabilities in health content creation and communication. To date, it has produced a cumulative total of 4 million pieces of health education content, including more than 400,000 short-video episodes.

Yang Minglu, General Manager of Baidu Health, stated that Baidu has accelerated its expansion into the healthcare sector, establishing five major systems: health knowledge popularization services, online consultation services, a health e-commerce platform, chronic disease management services, and internet hospital services. Leveraging the entry-point advantage of Baidu Search, Baidu Health responds to over 200 million health-related search queries daily and serves more than 100 million users per day, making it a core gateway for users to access health content and services. In 2019, Baidu launched its health science popularization brand, Baidu Health Medical Encyclopedia, collaborating with top-tier domestic and international medical resources to build an authoritative platform for medical and health education. To date, it has partnered with more than 1,000 leading experts, including academicians, hospital presidents, and chairs of professional societies, as well as over 120 authoritative institutions. This investment in Youlai Doctor will, on one hand, introduce a large volume of authoritative, high-quality health education content to the Baidu Health platform, meeting user search needs in a more diversified and refined manner; on the other hand, it will enhance Baidu Health’s physician operation capabilities, accelerating the implementation of a closed-loop model combining authoritative physician-created educational content with services, thereby strengthening its competitive moat in health services.

At the 2021 Baidu World Conference, Baidu announced its comprehensive push into key sectors such as healthcare, short-form video, and live streaming. It also highlighted its mobile ecosystem “X+Y” layout and strategy, which aims to upgrade the entire ecosystem toward service-oriented and personalized models by “expanding user scale horizontally and deepening vertical industry specialization vertically.” Following its equity investment in “Youlai Doctor,” Baidu will further deepen its layout in the vertical sector of “medical healthcare,” enhance physician operational capabilities, increase diversified health service innovations through formats such as short-form videos and live streaming, and strive for a dominant position at the traffic source of the healthcare industry.