Mingdu Zhiyun Secures Over RMB 300 Million in Series B Strategic Financing Led by China Merchants Health

VCBeat learned at the first opportunity,Mingdu Zhiyun, a digital transformation service provider in the life sciences sector, announced the completion of its Series B strategic financing round, raising over RMB 300 million.China Merchants Health led the strategic investment with RMB 250 million, followed by co-investors including Zhongxin Industrial Investment. The funds raised in this round will be primarily used to sustain the company’s investment in research and development (R&D) and innovation, strengthen its team of industry experts and high-level talent in pharmaceuticals, R&D, and business operations, further expand market presence, and deepen digital penetration across the industry.

Photo from the Strategic Cooperation Signing Ceremony between Mingdu Intelligence and China Merchants Health (Provided by the Enterprise)

Mingdu Intelligence, founded in 2017, is a company dedicated to providing pharmaceutical enterprisesProviding full lifecycle solutions from R&D to productiona digital transformation service provider. With the mission of “safeguarding every medication and protecting every patient,” the company focuses on the full value chain of digital services for pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing, empowering its partners to achieve digital and intelligent transformation.

The company’s core business includes providing pharmaceutical enterprises withOne-Stop Intelligent Drug R&D Service Platform(including Scientific Data Management System (SDMS), Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN), Project Portfolio Management (PPM), electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) submission, etc.) andPharmaceutical Intelligent Manufacturing Platform(including Manufacturing Execution System (MES), Electronic Batch Record (EBR), Warehouse Management System (WMS), Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), underlying automation control, SCADA, etc.). To date, Mingdu has served more than 100 leading domestic pharmaceutical companies, including Shanghai Pharmaceuticals Group, Livzon Group, China Resources Sanjiu, Yangtze River Pharmaceutical Group, Huahai Pharmaceutical, Baita Pharmaceutical, East China Medicine, Luye Pharma, 3SBio, and Porton Pharma.

Whether in pharmaceutical manufacturing, investment in information technology, or logistics capabilities, the current state of development in China’s pharmaceutical industry still lags significantly behind the advanced levels seen in the United States, the European Union, and Japan. This disparity has, to some extent, hindered Chinese-made drugs from achieving true “equal competition” with those produced by leading countries abroad.

An analysis of the underlying reasons reveals that most domestic pharmaceutical companies still rely primarily on manual labor for the management and operation of their R&D and production workshops. This often leads to issues such as process instability and batch-to-batch variability, making it difficult for these companies to ensure consistent overall manufacturing quality. In contrast, abroad, companies like Siemens and Rockwell had already begun comprehensively assisting large pharmaceutical manufacturers in replacing manual operations with automated information systems to manage entire production facilities as early as the 1980s and 1990s.

To enhance the pharmaceutical manufacturing standards across China’s entire pharmaceutical industry, the national government has been continuously introducing policies in recent years to drive supply-side structural reforms in the sector:

In July 2016, the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) issued the Technical Guidelines for Electronic Data Capture in Clinical Trials, the Technical Guidelines for Clinical Trial Data Management, and the Guiding Principles for Planning and Reporting of Data Management and Statistical Analysis in Drug Clinical Trials to promote the digitalization of the R&D process;

In November 2018, the National Medical Products Administration issued the “Guiding Opinions on the Construction of an Informatization Traceability System for Drugs,” to further advance the development of a drug traceability system and establish an informatized drug traceability system that ensures sources are verifiable and destinations are traceable.

In June 2019, the State Council issued the Vaccine Administration Law of the People's Republic of China; in August of the same year, the newly revised Drug Administration Law was adopted.

In July 2020, the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) issued the Good Practices for Drug Records and Data Management (Trial) to strengthen the management of records and data in drug research and development, manufacturing, distribution, and use, thereby ensuring that relevant information is authentic, accurate, complete, and traceable. The Requirements officially came into effect on December 1 last year.

Policies are being frequently strengthened, requiring pharmaceutical companies to establish a full-process traceability system covering R&D, production, logistics, and consumption.Digital transformation and intelligent manufacturing upgrades for Chinese pharmaceutical companies are urgently needed.

“For pharmaceutical companies to truly grow and thrive, they must complete their informatization and digital transformation, elevate manufacturing standards, fully unleash productivity, and ensure drug quality. This is not only a requirement of the times but also an inevitable trend,” Ge Yafei, founder of Mingdu Intelligence, told VCBeat.

Currently, Mingdu Intelligence offers digital products and services tailored to the R&D and production needs of pharmaceutical companies, with a core focus on helping them: ① strengthen R&D management, enable intelligent laboratory data handling, and improve R&D efficiency through technologies such as big data, algorithms, and AI; ② enhance pharmaceutical compliance, optimize yield and output, promote more proactive quality control, and accumulate data to refine processes and identify golden batches through the deployment of intelligent control and manufacturing execution systems.

By enabling pharmaceutical companies to digitize their operations and leverage data as a business asset, Mingdu facilitates optimized decision-making in areas such as cost, manufacturing processes, and quality. Mingdu is committed to helping pharmaceutical enterprises gradually build green, intelligent, and efficient future factories equipped with capabilities for self-perception, self-learning, self-decision-making, self-execution, and self-adaptation.

Furthermore, Mingdu is progressively transitioning its products to a cloud-based (SaaS) model through continuous product and technological innovation. In the future, Mingdu will continue to refine its product features and deeply integrate industry know-how to deliver sustained value to its customers.

Through its talent-driven strategy and collaborative career partnership mechanism, Mingdu Intelligence has rapidly assembled and cultivated a management team with outstanding operational capabilities, a senior expert team with extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry, and a seasoned development and implementation team specializing in the digital field.

The company’s founder, Ge Yafei, previously served as Chairman and President of a publicly listed company, bringing extensive operational and global experience in smart factories, robotics, and the pharmaceutical sector. Mingdu’s core team comprises senior talent from globally leading pharmaceutical, automation, and internet enterprises such as WuXi AppTec, NNIT, Siemens, HP Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Huawei, and H3C, with technical personnel accounting for more than 70% of the team.The multidisciplinary and multi-technical expertise of the Mingdu team enables comprehensive coverage across diverse professional domains, including pharmaceuticals, software, hardware, information security, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, regulatory affairs, and validation.The continuous iteration of the company’s core products (currently including versions 1.0 and 2.0) and the ongoing implementation of digitalization projects for leading pharmaceutical companies fully demonstrate the outstanding capabilities of the company’s team.

Mingdu places great emphasis on intellectual property rights and the development of management systems, currently holding more than 130 patents and software copyrights. To date, the Mingdu team has received numerous accolades, including: “Mingdu Smart Pharmaceutical Informatics MES Software” was recognized as a Zhejiang Province First-Edition Software Product Application (the only one in the pharmaceutical industry to date); “Mingdu Smart Biopharmaceutical Industry Industrial Internet Platform” was designated as a Key Provincial-Level Industrial Internet Platform in Zhejiang Province (the only one in the pharmaceutical industry to date) and received certification as an Industrial Internet Platform within the Yangtze River Delta G60 Science and Technology Innovation Corridor; it was listed among the “2020 Key Projects for High-Quality Development of Zhejiang’s Software Industry”; and it won First Prize in the Zhejiang Division of the 2020 China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

China Merchants Health, the lead investor in this round, stated, “The transformation of the healthcare industry is a process characterized by the convergence of digital and biotechnologies, along with the comprehensive restructuring of the entire chain encompassing R&D, production, and clinical application. Guided by its strategic mission of ‘Technology Leadership, Value-Based Health,’ China Merchants Health joins hands with Mingdu Intelligence, which is driven by the mission to ‘Safeguard Every Medication, Protect Every Patient.’ Going forward, both parties will jointly refine products and explore markets, advancing the digital and intelligent transformation of pharmaceutical and healthcare enterprises. They aim to build smart factories that are leading in China and first-class in the industry, providing partners with guarantees in productivity, efficiency, and safety, thereby promoting their sustainable development.”

CSSD Group’s investment platform, CSSD Industrial Investment, stated, “In the 2020 ranking of China’s biomedical industrial parks, Suzhou Industrial Park ranked first in both industrial innovation capability and talent competitiveness. There is immense potential for digitalization, networking, and intelligent transformation among related enterprises. As a software platform company and the leading domestic brand in its vertical sector, dedicated to guiding high-quality industry development and enabling rapid digital transformation, Mingdu Intelligence focuses on the life sciences field. It has successfully developed premier products such as intelligent R&D, intelligent manufacturing, and intelligent logistics, assisting pharmaceutical companies in planning and building digital factories. This aligns perfectly with the development needs of the biomedical industry in Suzhou Industrial Park. Through investment and collaboration, CSSD Industrial Investment aims to continuously promote the innovative development of the IoT and big data technology ecosystem for the biomedical sector in Suzhou Industrial Park.”

In June 2020, China Merchants Group established China Merchants Health Industry Holdings Co., Ltd. as a second-tier subsidiary. The Group will leverage China Merchants Health Industry Holdings Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “China Merchants Health”) as its platform company for the health industry, focusing on key priorities and challenges in the development of China’s health sector to vigorously expand its health industry operations. Guided by the strategic mission of “Technology-Led, Value-Based Health” (optimizing individual and population-level treatment outcomes within given resource constraints), China Merchants Health positions itself as an “Enabler of Value-Based Health in the Digital Age.” By prioritizing the core tracks of “New Payment Models–New Technologies–Digital Health” and driven by the dual engines of digital technology and life sciences, the company aims to become a pivotal force driving transformation in China’s healthcare industry.

CSSD Suzhou Industrial Park Industrial Investment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “CSSD Industrial Investment”) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Development Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “CSSD Group”) and the parent company of CSSD Suzhou Industrial Park Private Equity Fund Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “CSSD Capital”).

China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Development Group (CSSD) was established in August 1994 through a collaborative effort between the Chinese and Singaporean governments. As the primary entity for park development and a key vehicle for China-Singapore cooperation, CSSD has made significant contributions to the development and construction of the Suzhou Industrial Park. In 2019, CSSD was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Guided by its mission to “Build China’s Dreams, Create New-Type Parks” and adhering to the principles of “thriving industries, comprehensive supporting facilities, pleasant environment, and social harmony,” CSSD has established a business structure with park development and operation as its core segment, supported by two wings: industrial carrier support services and green public utilities. Through segment synergy and resource aggregation, CSSD aims to achieve high-level integration of industry and urban development, thereby facilitating national technological innovation and industrial upgrading.

Sino-Singapore Industrial Investment aligns with the development strategy of Sino-Singapore Group, leverages its presence in the development zone, and focuses on fields such as life sciences, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology applications. It deeply explores investment opportunities, empowers portfolio companies through multi-dimensional support, and drives their leapfrog growth.