DXY Mom University Files IPO Prospectus: Pioneering Systematized Maternal & Child Health Knowledge Services in China's Internet Healthcare Sector

On January 8, Dingxiang Mama, a key consumer-facing brand under Dingxiang Yuan, launched its new product, “Dingxiang Mama University.” Designed with a systematic approach, the new product offers more targeted solutions for maternal and infant health knowledge. Its content is curated, reviewed, and produced by Dingxiang Mama in collaboration with hundreds of physicians and expert teams.

In fact, since its inception, the Dingxiang Mama brand has consistently centered its services around maternal and infant health knowledge, with product formats evolving across different stages: After the launch of Dingxiang Mama’s new media platform in 2015, it entered the market through professional science popularization, offering fragmented maternal and infant health information; In 2017, it expanded into online courses, developing knowledge-payment services within the WeChat ecosystem, and began transitioning from fragmented content to systematic solutions; In September 2018, the Dingxiang Mama App was launched, positioning itself as a professional provider of maternal and infant health knowledge services.

“Dingxiang Mom University” further systematizes and integrates maternal and infant knowledge based on the accumulation from the aforementioned stages. Therefore, Dingxiang Mom focuses on the niche market of maternal and infant knowledge services within the broader sector of internet-based maternal and child health services, while “Dingxiang Mom University” represents a more precise and systematically designed product offering within this niche segment.

At the product launch of “Dingxiang Mom University” on January 8, Chu Yang, Vice President of Dingxiang Yuan and founder of the Dingxiang Doctor and Dingxiang Mom brands, stated that “Dingxiang Mom University” will help address the various challenges faced by new mothers during the critical 1,000-day period of pregnancy and early child-rearing.

On the day of the launch, “Dingxiang Mom University” unveiled its inaugural program, the Pregnancy Academy, offering more than 300 courses covering topics such as preconception care, prenatal nutrition, prenatal health, lifestyle during pregnancy, and smooth delivery. These courses were jointly developed by a team comprising 23 obstetrics and maternity experts, 15 pediatric specialists, 3 registered dietitians, and body-shaping instructors. In the future, “Dingxiang Mom University” will continue to roll out systematic course series for new parents, focusing on infant and toddler feeding, postpartum recovery, and postpartum body shaping.

“‘Dingxiang Mom University’ is not merely an online product; we will bring one of its branches, namely Dingxiang Mom Mini Classroom, to offline settings,” said Chu Yang. He added that a series of parenting books and other related merchandise would also be published.

To ensure a better user experience after launch, “Dingxiang Mom University” has invited 30,000 users to participate in its beta testing phase.

Whether they are full-time housewives or working mothers, target users have fragmented schedules. Zheng Kang, Product Lead at DXY Mom, explained that “DXY Mom University” designs its products following the “goal–path–feedback” framework. It incorporates elements such as learning objectives, study reminders, progress showcases, and random rewards to motivate users to engage in continuous learning amidst their fragmented daily routines, maintain user interaction, and enhance learning outcomes.

“Dingxiang Mama University” has been launched, after which Dingxiang Mama as a whole will provide users with more targeted maternal and infant knowledge solutions in a tiered and phased manner. The product matrix covers three levels of needs, namely:

The Pregnancy Encyclopedia and basic tools, as foundational products, provide mothers with problem-solving resources and are offered free of charge to all mother users.

“Dingxiang Mom University” and specialized paid courses, co-created by experts, are presented in a more systematic manner to empower mothers with problem-solving capabilities;

"Consultations and training camps can directly help mothers resolve various practical issues encountered during pregnancy and child-rearing."

Dingxiang Mama's Product Matrix

“We focus primarily on scenarios that lie above daily life but below disease treatment,” said Du Yidan, head of business at DXY Mom. Eighty percent of DXY Mom’s users have received higher education; they place greater trust in professional and authoritative knowledge, possess strong independent thinking skills, and are generally unlikely to accept information from a single source uncritically.

In response, Dingxiang Mama has contracted over 800 experts, including physicians from tertiary hospitals, nutritionists, psychological counselors, and body-shaping coaches, and has established a review committee comprising more than 1,000 members. “All content is produced by experts and then reviewed by the review committee,” introduced Du Yidan. After these two stages, the content is further processed by the Dingxiang Mama editorial team, which includes members with both professional and media backgrounds, ensuring that the content balances professionalism, readability, and shareability.

Du Yidan believes that, given the unique characteristics of the maternal and child health knowledge user base, content must be not only professional but also efficient. Dingxiang Mama achieves these two goals through a “systematic knowledge structure × clear user experience pathway.”

Although Dingxiang Mama generally provides services to users in a tiered and phased manner, with products including an encyclopedia of pregnancy and parenting, parenting tools, courses, and medical consultations—overlapping with most internet-based maternal and child health products—in reality, Dingxiang Mama’s core focus is limited to just one niche segment within the internet maternal and child health service sector: maternal and child knowledge services.

Dingxiang Mama’s Focus on Internet-Based Maternal and Child Health Services, Chart by VCBeat

Currently, the product forms of internet-based maternal and child health services are already quite diverse, mainly including:

Practical tools, such as prenatal checkup reminders, hospital appointment registration, report inquiries, food compatibility and contraindication checks, and growth curves;

Q&A Functionality: Primarily includes user-to-user and user-to-expert inquiries, facilitating the exchange of experience and knowledge;

Social tools, primarily community forum-based products;

Online Consultation: Platforms with proper qualifications may conduct online consultations;

Knowledge services, mainly including free popular science and paid knowledge.

Revenue sources for internet-based maternal and infant health services are also diversified, primarily consisting of advertising, e-commerce for maternal and infant products, online consultation services, and paid knowledge content. The latter includes paid courses and paid Q&A sessions. Since 2015, internet-based maternal and infant health services have experienced explosive growth, giving rise to a large number of outstanding enterprises.

Why Does Dingxiang Mama Focus Solely on Maternal and Child Health Knowledge Services?

“Maternal and infant knowledge services are still in their infancy; we are among the first to venture into this uncharted territory,” Chu Yang stated in an interview with VCBeat. He noted that during their earlier explorations, they first observed strong user demand for maternal and infant health information, then piloted paid knowledge products on an experimental basis. The market response was positive, demonstrating the target audience’s willingness to pay.

Currently, Dingxiang Mom has over 10 million users across all platforms, with more than 800,000 paying subscribers. Despite its large overall user base and high traffic for science-based health content, Chu Yang stated that Dingxiang Mom’s primary revenue source is not advertising but rather its smaller base of paying users. “Over the past two years, Dingxiang Mom has achieved substantial revenue and profitability, with a considerable growth trend. Revenue from paid knowledge services accounts for 80% of total revenue,” Chu Yang introduced.

Although Chuyang has not disclosed specific revenue and profit figures, VCBeat observed on the Dingxiang Mama app that its best-selling individual course achieved sales of up to 87,000 units at a unit price of RMB 143, generating approximately RMB 12 million in revenue from this single course alone. These figures offer a glimpse into its performance.

However, in the past two years, the industry has noted a significant shift: the baby boom driven by the two-child policy has passed, with the number of newborns declining year by year and potentially continuing to drop. Meanwhile, as competition for users intensifies across mobile internet products, user time and attention have become increasingly fragmented, causing the traffic dividend to rapidly diminish—a trend that also applies to internet-based maternal and child health services.

Chu Yang believes that this will impact businesses in the maternal and infant health industry that are primarily driven by the attention economy and supported by scale, but it will have little effect on maternal and infant knowledge-based services. “Our user insights are built on the consumption needs and willingness of new-generation mothers. We have currently identified two growth trends: first, an increasing number of mothers are willing to invest more time and money in child-rearing; second, a growing number of mothers are beginning to focus on themselves and are willing to pay for self-improvement.”

As a key brand under the DXY umbrella, Dingxiang Mama has cultivated deep expertise in maternal and infant knowledge services. What resources from DXY does it leverage, and what position does it hold within DXY’s overall strategy?

Let's take a look at this set of data.

Dingxiang Yuan, which originated from an academic exchange community for physicians, has strategically expanded its business over the past two decades into four key sectors: to D (doctors), to H (hospitals), to B (businesses), and to C (consumers). It has established China’s leading medical academic forum and a suite of mobile products, and has wholly funded the establishment of four offline general practice clinics. By leveraging a professional and authoritative content-sharing platform, extensive and comprehensive data accumulation, and standardized, high-quality medical services, Dingxiang Yuan connects hospitals, physicians, researchers, patients, biopharmaceutical companies, and insurers. The platform serves tens of millions of general users and boasts 5.5 million professional users, including 2.1 million physician users, accounting for 71% of all physicians in China.

Synergy Between Dingxiang Mama and Dingxiang Yuan’s Overall Business, Chart by VCBeat

Therefore, DXY’s abundant and readily accessible resources, particularly its physician network, serve as the foundation for Dingxiang Mama’s professional content production; its B2B business also enables Dingxiang Mama to rapidly connect with corporate partners.

Secondly, when users encounter disease diagnosis and treatment needs that cannot be addressed by maternal and infant knowledge or tools, DXY Internet Hospital and DXY Clinic can provide corresponding online or offline medical services. Users of knowledge-based services can convert into medical service users, and vice versa; similarly, online users can convert into offline users, and vice versa.

Of course, with the support of DXY’s extensive advantageous resources, Dingxiang Mama has also taken on important responsibilities.

In recent years, DXY’s core brand has gradually shifted toward the broader health industry. In October 2019, DXY unveiled its new vision, “More Health, Better Life,” formally establishing “health” as the central direction of its strategic layout. As a key component of DXY’s push into consumer-facing health scenarios, Dingxiang Mama’s focus on maternal and infant knowledge services has become a vital entry point into family health contexts, creating substantial growth potential for DXY’s next round of expansion.

In response, Li Tiantian, founder and chairman of DXY, stated at the product launch of “Dingxiang Mama University”: “After all these years in internet healthcare, we have come to realize that what we are doing is not internet healthcare, but internet education.”

Li Tiantian explained that DXY initially focused on educating physicians, helping them use the internet to search for literature and engage in academic exchanges. Later, its business expanded to the consumer sector, providing health education to the general public. “Looking back on DXY’s 20-year journey, we have essentially been playing the role of a virtual university, although we never explicitly articulated this concept. Now, with the launch of ‘Dingxiang Mom University,’ we are finally voicing what has long been in our hearts.”

From this perspective, DXY Mom not only maintains a high degree of synergy with other businesses under DXY but also plays a pivotal role in the future implementation of strategic initiatives.

At the product launch event, Dingxiang Mom announced partnerships with Purcotton, a subsidiary of Winner Medical, and WeSure, Tencent’s insurance agency platform. Its strategic partners also include ZhiBei Medical and Zhuozheng Medical, while its content collaborators encompass both individuals and institutions.

Chu Yang candidly stated that although Dingxiang Mom has already collaborated with a large number of outstanding experts on content, it will need to further engage top-tier experts and teams in the knowledge services sector in the future. “At the same time, we also hope to collaborate with more enterprises that have differentiated positioning but share our values—namely, science, evidence-based practice, and professionalism.”

However, Dingxiang Mama maintains rigorous standards for selecting partner companies and products, having established an internal scientific review team. This team is responsible for vetting products to confirm their safety and efficacy before any collaboration can proceed.

Through a series of internal resource synergies and external collaborations, Chu Yang believes that for the future of Dingxiang Mama (Dingxiang Mom), market awareness of maternal and infant knowledge services remains insufficient. For most people, paying for knowledge-based virtual products is still a novel concept, and user education will take time. As the market is still in its early stages, it is difficult to estimate its size or predict Dingxiang Mama’s potential market share. “However, one thing is certain: users’ willingness to pay for virtual products is strengthening, making the future outlook promising.”