Jingfeng Medical Raises Tens of Millions in A+ Round Led by Legend Star and Poly Capital, Files IPO Prospectus

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that Shenzhen Edge Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (Edge Medical), a developer of intelligent surgical systems, has completed its A+ round of financing, raising tens of millions of yuan. The investment was co-led by Legend Star and Poly Capital, with Sanzheng Health participating as a follow-on investor.

Wang Jianchen, founder of Edge Medical, stated that the proceeds from this financing round will be primarily used to advance clinical trials for the company’s surgical robot products. Edge Medical expects to formally commence clinical trials within this year, positioning itself as the second single-port surgical robotics company globally to enter the clinical stage. Meanwhile, the company will accelerate production line construction and supplement its R&D efforts by establishing a modern, high-end manufacturing facility for surgical robots to meet the production demands of its initial phase. Furthermore, Edge Medical will maintain a rapid pace of R&D, with a focus on enhancing product craftsmanship and reliability, while also expanding into areas such as telemedicine and simulation-based training.

After nearly three years of development, Edge Medical has achieved comprehensive technological breakthroughs, with its product prototypes undergoing rapid iteration and maturation. Leveraging strong team execution and product commercialization capabilities, Edge Medical has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in China’s surgical robot sector.

Currently, the company has established collaborations with multiple top-tier hospitals both domestically and internationally. Its products are expected to be widely applied in departments such as general surgery, urology, and thoracic surgery.

 Edge Medical Surgical Robot Product Demonstration

Edge Medical is a developer of intelligent surgical systems, specializing in the research, development, and promotion of next-generation intelligent surgical systems. It integrates equipment and robot-assisted surgical technologies, artificial intelligence, visualization technology, multi-dimensional sensing technology, and complex mechanical structure design, with a commitment to enhancing therapeutic efficacy and surgical safety.

Currently, Edge Medical’s core product is a single-port surgical robot. Single-port surgical robots are widely recognized as the direction for the next generation of surgical robotic platforms in the medical robotics field. By consolidating multiple incisions into a single one, this technology further reduces surgical trauma and intraoperative blood loss, thereby lowering the risk of patient infection and recovery costs. The system features a relatively compact footprint, requiring less operating room space. Furthermore, single-port surgical robots eliminate the complex preoperative positioning required for multi-arm systems, streamlining the surgical workflow. This leads to reduced anesthesia time for patients and shorter postoperative recovery periods.

In terms of market size, according to statistics from the International Federation of Robotics, the global medical robot market reached $11.9 billion by 2017 and is projected to reach $18 billion by 2020. The development of medical surgical robots has been included in "Made in China 2025," and surgical robots are one of the indispensable devices for the localization of high-end medical equipment.

The surgical robotics market holds immense promise, yet Intuitive Surgical dominates the global landscape. The value of surgical robots extends beyond minimally invasive, precise, and intelligent procedures; they represent the direction for next-generation intelligent minimally invasive surgical robotic platforms. As surgical robots continue to rapidly iterate and evolve, startups in this field must not only possess the capability to provide domestic alternatives but also demonstrate strong technical development and engineering iteration capabilities, forward-looking vision, and a deep understanding of clinical pain points.

Edge Medical, founded in 2017, has achieved core technological breakthroughs in single-port surgical robots over the past three years. These advancements encompass the four major components of surgical robot systems: the surgeon console, the slave robot, the endoscopic imaging system, and multi-degree-of-freedom instruments. Edge Medical has independently developed these technologies, iterating through more than four generations to achieve stable performance.

In several key technological areas of single-port surgical robots, such as wire-driven transmission, master-slave teleoperation, 3D image processing and display, hybrid force/position control, and integrated robot design, stable versions have been developed. Certain performance parameters have reached internationally leading levels; for instance, the company’s 3D image processing technology has reduced the overall image system latency to under 50 ms, outperforming the da Vinci system.

It is reported that Edge Medical’s surgical robots have completed large-scale animal trials, with experimental data indicating that the single-port robot offers unique clinical advantages in certain surgical procedures. Meanwhile, the performance of Edge Medical’s surgical robot prototypes currently meets the inspection standards for surgical robots set by China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA, formerly CFDA) and the European Union’s CE certification.

Edge Medical Single-Port Surgical Robot

Wang Jianchen believes that Edge Medical’s recent financing round reflects the company’s comprehensive strength. On one hand, Edge Medical boasts a strong team structure: its founding team consists of PhDs with educational backgrounds from MIT and Harvard, who have accumulated over a decade of experience in surgical robotics research and possess profound technical expertise. The core R&D team comprises scientists from world-renowned institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Imperial College London, and Nanyang Technological University, as well as seasoned key engineers from prominent companies including Siemens, Olympus, and Huawei. Additionally, Edge Medical has established a medical advisory team, with Professor Huang Jian, President-Elect of the Urology Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, serving as the company’s Chief Medical Officer. On the other hand, the Edge Medical team demonstrates strong execution capabilities and rapid growth potential.

In the global surgical robotics market, the da Vinci Surgical System has monopolized the market by leveraging patent barriers. For domestic enterprises, patent portfolio strategy will significantly impact subsequent commercialization. Edge Medical’s surgical robot is a high-end medical device with fully independent intellectual property rights. The company has filed more than 200 patents to date, establishing a robust intellectual property protection system.

Lu Gang, a partner at Legend Star, stated that over the past decade, Legend Star has invested in and incubated hundreds of enterprises in the fields of intelligence and healthcare, nurturing several well-known companies such as Face++, Kintor Pharmaceutical, Burning Rock Biotech, and Deepwise AI. In the cross-disciplinary track of “AI + Healthcare,” surgical robots are a key area of our focus. They represent an important branch in the evolution of medical intelligence: currently serving as an extension of the “surgeon’s hands,” they will evolve into a surgical instrument platform, and gradually develop into extensions of the “surgeon’s eyes” and “surgeon’s brain.” Edge Medical, founded just over two years ago, initially caught my attention with a short video demonstrating its single-port surgical robot peeling an eggshell. However, through subsequent interactions and communications, the team demonstrated a strong global perspective and exceptional R&D capabilities, convincing me that this team possesses the potential for rapid future growth.

As one of the lead investors in this financing round, Li Wenxuan, Deputy General Manager of Poly Capital, stated: “Poly Capital is a professional private equity fund management company under China Poly Group. We adhere to an investment strategy centered on the real estate industry chain and driven by artificial intelligence. In terms of AI-driven investments, we currently collaborate with Hangzhou Xiacheng State-owned Investment and 4Paradigm, a leading AI enterprise, to systematically focus on sectors such as foundational AI technologies, intelligent transformation of industries, and AI-driven consumption and scenario-based changes. We are optimistic about Edge Medical’s excellent team composition and advanced technological capabilities, and we believe that Edge has the potential to become a pioneer in surgical robotics in China, breaking foreign monopolies. Meanwhile, we are bullish on Edge’s potential in the AI era. The richness of medical data in China and the abundance of expert rules present new platform-level opportunities for surgical robotics in the Chinese market. Given Edge Medical’s strengths in data-driven decision-making and integrated application of composite technologies, we believe it can emerge as a leading international enterprise.”