Nuanwa Technology Secures RMB 100 Million Series A Funding Led by Longfor Capital, with Sequoia China Increasing Its Stake

On February 28, VCBeat learned thatHealthNova Technology Announces Completion of RMB 100 Million Series A Financing. This round of financing was led by Longhu Capital, with follow-on investment from Lighthouse Growth Fund and increased participation from Sequoia Capital China. Lighthouse Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this private equity financing round.

Nova Technology was established in October 2018, incubated by ZhongAn, China’s first internet insurance company, leveraging its leading digital technology capabilities and professional health insurance expertise.Provides a closed-loop health insurance technology service ecosystem for insurance companies and internet platforms, covering product customization, risk control, underwriting and claims operations, systems, and health management.

This latest round of financing comes just six months after the hundred-million-yuan angel round led by Sequoia China last August, underscoring renewed market recognition of Nova Technology’s closed-loop health insurance technology service model.

In an interview with VCBeat, Lu Min, CEO of Nova Technology, revealed, “Last year, we established a technological ecosystem service capability for the closed-loop health insurance model. In 2020, we will deepen and refine our closed-loop services to offer more differentiated products to the market.”

In August 2019, Nova Technology made headlines with the announcement of a RMB 100 million angel financing round led by Sequoia China. From its inception, Nova has attracted significant market attention, bolstered by the halo of being “incubated by ZhongAn, led by Sequoia, and operating in a high-growth sector.”

Over the past six months, Nova Technology has delivered a performance record commensurate with its accolades. In the fourth quarter alone, it signed contracts with more than 10 insurance companies.Over the past six months, all core business metrics have achieved 100%–200% growth.To date, Nova Technology has partnered with over 20 corporate clients, including deep strategic collaborations with insurers such as Chengtai Property Insurance and Bohai Property Insurance. By providing end-to-end technical support spanning product development, operations, and systems, Nova Technology has enabled a truly closed-loop service model. Additionally, leveraging its technological capabilities, Nova Technology has helped a certain health insurance product in the market achieve an average monthly reduction in losses exceeding RMB 3 million.

The demand for Nova Technology’s products in the health insurance market is clearly evident. In recent years, the premium volume of health insurance has grown rapidly, yet claim payouts have risen at an even faster pace, posing significant challenges to insurers’ operational capabilities, risk control, and service delivery. A representative from Longhu Capital, the lead investor in this round, stated that within just over a year, Nova Technology successfully built a closed-loop health insurance technology service ecosystem and validated its business model, while also establishing deep strategic partnerships with multiple insurance clients. Such professional expertise and rapid execution are qualities we highly appreciate and recognize.

Zhai Jia, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital China Fund, stated: “Since receiving angel investment, Nova Technology has continuously innovated in technological capabilities and achieved breakthroughs in business operations, rapidly helping partners bolster their technological capabilities and earning high recognition..” We believe that Nova Technology will go further and faster in the field of health insurance technology.

Driven by clear market demands, Nova Technology provides customized services tailored to diverse customer needs.

According to Lu Min, CEO of Nova Technology, Nova’s customers are mainly divided into three categories:

First, for property and casualty insurers undergoing a transition into health insurance, Nova Technology has established deep strategic partnerships with them, providing integrated health insurance technology services across multiple dimensions—including underlying systems, underwriting, claims processing, risk control, and product development—to help them rapidly build foundational health insurance capabilities.

Second, for insurance companies seeking to technologically upgrade their health insurance operations, Nova Technology provides technological empowerment at key stages, steadily facilitating their transition toward online and intelligent business models.

Third, Nova Technology adheres to the principles of collaboration, openness, and mutual benefit, engaging in service sharing and complementary advantages with brokerage platforms, Third-Party Administrators (TPAs), and even similar technology companies.

Nova Technology’s products effectively address the industry’s shortcomings in technological adoption. A head of the health insurance division at an insurance company revealed why they chose Nova Technology: “Partnering solely with Nova Technology allows us to meet the needs across all business processes.”

On January 23 this year, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA), and eleven other ministries and commissions jointly issued a landmark document titled “Opinions on Promoting the Development of Commercial Insurance in the Social Services Sector.” This document reaffirms strong support for the development of health insurance and sets forth a target to expand the market size of commercial health insurance to RMB 2 trillion by 2025.

Under this trend, an increasing number of small and medium-sized insurance enterprises will certainly enter the health insurance market this year., the industry is also bound to sustain its momentum of rapid growth.

Faced with such a vast market, how to balance sales and risk control, improve operational efficiency, and penetrate the market through product differentiation has become the focus of attention in the industry.

From the perspective of the health insurance value chain, product development, sales, underwriting, claims processing, and healthcare management are mutually supportive. Technological capabilities must permeate the entire business chain to enhance operational efficiency and user experience, thereby facilitating sustained and healthy business growth. For most insurance companies, the challenge lies not in addressing isolated issues, but in achieving a comprehensive technological transformation of their overall insurance operations.

Since its inception, Nova Technology has pursued a strategy of building a closed-loop ecosystem for health insurance services, providing customers with a complete technology support chain—a significant advantage for the company. Every link in this business chain requires long-term accumulation and consolidation of operational capabilities, and Nova Technology, having been incubated by ZhongAn, possessed such capabilities from the outset.

In the health insurance technology sector, data is a core element. The Nova Technology team, led by Lu Min, has been dedicated to resolving challenges in establishing medical data connectivity. Currently, based on sufficient and lawful authorization, Nova Technology has not only partnered with over 1,000 hospitals but also collaborated with medical insurance and Health Commission platforms in more than ten provinces and municipalities, thousands of physical examination institutions, and specialized disease data platforms. Meanwhile, the medical knowledge base constructed by Nova Technology has surpassed 26 million entries, and its medical knowledge graph covers foundational databases for diseases, drugs, diagnostics and treatments, and medical materials across all health insurance scenarios, accumulating over 5.5 million medical knowledge triples.

In 2020, the health insurance market opened amidst the pandemic, which made technological capabilities and online business capabilities increasingly prominent and urgent for the industry. Lu Min stated that Nova Technology would continue to enrich its medical data ecosystem in 2020, focusing on upgrading services in the following three areas:

I. Upgrading Risk Control Capabilities in Health Insurance: On one hand, we continuously refine and enhance the existing medical data ecosystem, medical knowledge base, risk rule framework, and risk control models. On the other hand, we comprehensively elevate the intelligent application of core underwriting and claims risk control products. Specifically, “Easy Underwriting” provides insurers with comprehensive underwriting solutions: leveraging capabilities such as medical big data, health risk models, and intelligent text recognition to achieve fully automated analysis and processing for both online and offline business during the underwriting stage. “Easy Claims” and “Easy Investigation” offer holistic solutions for claims management: by continuously integrating medical data channels and enriching medical data dimensions, we further improve the claims risk control management system and enhance automation capabilities, thereby driving a multiplicative increase in the operational efficiency of health insurance claims processing.

II. Upgrading Health Insurance System Capabilities: Leveraging a team of professional research experts and developers, we support insurance enterprises in rapidly building internet-based health insurance business systems. The system supports online product configuration, policy management, channel integration, online underwriting and claims processing, and high-concurrency transaction handling. Furthermore, by deeply integrating Nova Technology’s digital capabilities, automated operational capabilities, and risk control capabilities with the health insurance system, we provide a one-stop solution to help insurers build technology-driven business capabilities.

III. Upgrading Health Insurance Service Capabilities: Launching intelligent health management solutions that manage users’ health across their entire life cycle, thereby empowering insurers to deliver multidimensional, scenario-based, and online health service offerings. These services include personalized insurance product customization and pricing, sub-health management, expedited medical access, rehabilitation and physiotherapy, as well as health consultation and education, ultimately enhancing user stickiness and experience while driving effective business growth.

Following this round of financing, Nova Technology will continue to deepen its presence in the health insurance technology sector, collaborate with health insurers for mutual progress, and uphold the principles of cooperation, openness, and win-win outcomes to drive the digitalization and intelligent development of the health insurance industry.

“In the future, we hope that everyone will have access to health insurance products that are both suitable for their needs and sufficiently affordable,” said Lu Min.