YunzhuYang Completes Pre-A Round of RMB 10 Million to Integrate Premium Medical Resources for Elder Care Institutions and Day-Care Centers

“The odd thing about this industry is that, although everyone knows it’s a blue ocean, once you actually ‘dive in,’ you find the water icy cold,” said Peng Tiantuo on the other end of the line. “Fortunately, we’ve felt a warm current.”

VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat) has learned that Beijing Yunzhuyang Technology Co., Ltd. (“Yunzhuyang”) completed a RMB 10 million Pre-A financing round at the end of 2018. According to Peng Tiantuo, founder of Yunzhuyang, this round marked the company’s first true equity financing and was invested by a listed company.

Yunzhuyang was established in April 2016 as a platform service provider offering solutions to enterprises in the elderly care sector. Its SaaS platform is continuously refined based on user feedback, with updates released every two to three weeks. Reportedly, Yunzhuyang spent two years analyzing hundreds of millions of behavioral images of older adults, leading to the launch of an AI-powered behavioral camera that leverages deep learning technology to predict elderly behavior.

VCBeat has learned that Yunzhuyang’s service platform has reached a mature stage, with its services currently deployed in over 400 elderly care institutions across more than 10 provinces and municipalities. Now, Yunzhuyang is extending its reach into community-based care. Why is Yunzhuyang developing community-oriented services? How will this round of financing support its business expansion? What are Yunzhuyang’s next steps? With these questions in mind, our reporter called Peng Tiantuo, founder of Yunzhuyang.

By a stroke of luck, in late 2015, Peng Tiantuo entered the elderly care sector and discovered that information technology adoption in nursing homes was remarkably weak. Many institutions still relied on paper-based registration, and even those that had implemented IT systems merely used them to archive resident records and periodically update information, failing to leverage the core value of digital platforms. Subsequently, Peng led his entire team from Beijing to Guizhou for on-site inspections, after which they decided to pivot the company’s business model entirely.

“When we first started out, we knew very little. Our entire team plunged headfirst into nursing homes, where we ate, lived, and worked,” recalled Peng Tiantuo. As our understanding deepened through numerous trials and iterations, we ultimately decided to build a platform-based company aimed at helping various elderly care institutions establish standardized and streamlined management systems. Furthermore, the platform connects multiple stakeholders, enabling seamless information exchange among the government, care facilities, family members, and seniors. This platform-oriented approach fueled the rapid growth of Yunzhuyang over two years, with its solutions implemented in more than 400 elderly care institutions across over ten provinces and municipalities.

As the Yunzhuyang SaaS service platform model has gained traction among institutions, the team believes that there is further potential to expand Yunzhuyang’s market presence and that it is now well-positioned to enter the community care sector. “Our community-based business model centers on adult day care facilities, connecting elderly individuals with various resources,” said Peng Tiantuo. “We do not view this as adding a new business line; rather, institutional and community services are simply different manifestations of the same underlying approach.” Peng emphasized that, even when providing products to different institutions, Yunzhuyang tailors its solutions to each client’s specific circumstances and needs.

The expansion into the community sector relies heavily on the “resources” accumulated in the early stages. Peng Tiantuo revealed that Yunzhuyang is currently undergoing internal testing at seven chain elderly care institutions and is expected to launch a public beta trial at 30 such facilities in July. At that time, Yunzhuyang will select enterprises with regional representativeness and strong influence to promote the platform, thereby further extending its reach into local communities.

In addition to resources, Peng Tiantuo told reporters that over the past three years, Yunzhuyang has encountered numerous challenges in its development and has gradually developed its own set of solutions.

Cloud-Based Elderly Care Business Architecture (Image source: Provided by the enterprise)

In fact, there is an unwritten rule within Yunzhuyang: a “rotating business trip” system, under which every employee has the experience of being dispatched. These employees visit leading elderly care institutions in China to communicate with their frontline staff, and then return to report their findings, specifically identifying operational gaps or issues.

“Often, the reality is completely different from what you imagine,” said Peng Tiantuo. “In this industry, you’ll find that many ideas are excellent and forward-thinking. However, elderly care is, after all, a service industry, requiring genuine care for seniors. In the process of serving them, if staff are forced to fully comply with management’s demands, many report, ‘I hardly have any time left to care for the elderly; I can only scramble to meet the data targets set by my boss.’”

To address the issue of caregivers needing to record large amounts of data, Yunzhuyang adheres to the principle that “any data that can be generated by devices should never be manually entered.” The platform is also integrated with smart devices such as intelligent mattresses, enabling direct synchronization of data to the platform.

To address the issue of overburdened caregiving staff, Yunzhuyang has introduced a “foolproof” operational solution. Taking the platform’s events section as an example: communities regularly organize activities and require staff to format images and content on the platform so that elderly residents can be informed promptly. However, in practice, community teams typically consist of only two or three members who must handle various tasks within the community, leaving them with insufficient time and energy to carefully arrange layouts and adjust fonts. Yunzhuyang addresses this by providing pre-designed templates with fixed image dimensions and text structures, allowing staff to simply replace the placeholder images and text.

Similarly, taking the activity section as an example, Peng Tiantuo explained to reporters the importance of age-appropriate content design: due to declining vision, older adults are often reluctant to read large blocks of text. In such cases, images should directly highlight key points that appeal to seniors, such as “Event on [date] at [location]: 30 free eggs” or “Government subsidies available.” The messaging should be straightforward, avoiding any need for older users to infer the intended meaning.

To address safety concerns for the elderly, Yunzhuyang spent two years analyzing over 100 million images of elderly behavior, effectively annotating tens of millions of data points, and launched AI-powered cameras that leverage deep learning technology to detect behaviors such as getting out of bed, falling from bed, and falls.

What appeals to young people is not necessarily suitable for the elderly. Peng Tiantuo stated that operating in the senior care sector is truly not about spinning narratives. While professionals in the elderly care industry often possess a certain degree of idealism, investors will not pay for sentiment alone; they seek enterprises that genuinely understand older adults and have gradually refined their models through practical experience.

What makes Peng Tiantuo proud is that Yunzhuyang’s software can be updated every two to three weeks. The team members highly value customer feedback and continuously refine and improve the system based on it.

When discussing core competitiveness, Peng Tiantuo stated that Yunzhuyang adopts a model combining software services with content. In addition to providing clients with software that is updated and iterated every two to three weeks, the company also introduces additional resources for its clients.

Accompanying population aging is a surge in health needs among the elderly, making it increasingly urgent to address the imbalance between scarce medical resources and the demand for health services for this demographic. Since older adults face difficulties traveling long distances and high-quality medical resources are often concentrated in major cities, how can we achieve precise matching between these premium medical resources and the elderly?

Yunzhu Yang’s team held several discussions on this issue and ultimately decided to directly introduce medical resources from first-tier cities by partnering with institutions and communities that provide Yunzhu Yang services. This approach yields dual benefits: on one hand, Yunzhu Yang’s clients (institutions and community service points) can enhance their brand image by integrating high-quality resources; on the other hand, it enables precise matching of premium medical resources with elderly individuals.

After finalizing its strategic direction, Yunzhuyang chose to focus on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, which are prevalent among the elderly. VCBeat learned that by the end of 2018, Yunzhuyang had established a strategic partnership with a leading domestic expert physician group specializing in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular care.