Chinese Aesthetic Platform YoungMay Secures Several Million RMB in New Funding to Build Offline-Centric Curated Marketplace

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that the medical aesthetics platform YoungMay (“YoungMay”) announced in December 2018 that it had completed its latest round of financing, amounting to several million yuan. The investor is an upstream industry enterprise that has entered into a long-term strategic partnership with YoungMay, providing maximal support in areas such as institutions, technology, and pharmaceuticals.

Founder Ma Jiayuesheng stated that the decision to partner with upstream enterprises at this stage aims to fundamentally help reduce costs for aesthetic clinics and beauty seekers, while leveraging Yuanmei’s professional and standardized services to enable consumers to achieve their desired appearance through the most direct pathway.

Yuanmei, an internet-based medical aesthetics platform that helps consumers make rigorous selections, was established in June 2017 and secured RMB 10 million in angel funding in September 2017.

Despite its massive scale, China’s medical aesthetics industry remains in a very early stage of market development. A scarcity of qualified plastic surgeons and inconsistent service capabilities among medical aesthetics institutions have led to a severe supply-demand imbalance, giving rise to widespread industry chaos: difficulties in verifying the authenticity of pharmaceutical products, significant price disparities across distribution channels, and consumers’ inability to reliably evaluate either institutions or physicians.

In the view of Ma Jiayue, founder and CEO of Yuanmei, having deeply cultivated the beauty industry for over a decade and gained a thorough understanding of every detail in the industry’s value chain, she is determined to help consumers find a safe and reliable path to aesthetic enhancement, thereby making efforts and contributions to counteract the “bad money driving out good” phenomenon in the industry. China’s medical aesthetics platforms have developed for five to six years, yet the pain points of medical aesthetics institutions remain unresolved. While the platforms’ “price-comparison mindset” does drive traffic to these institutions to some extent, the low-price strategy results in institutions sacrificing their profit margins.

“For medical aesthetic institutions, accepting a large volume of such clients yields limited financial returns; yet refusing them leaves practitioners with insufficient cases to maintain and enhance their technical expertise. This is not a sustainable development path for the entire medical aesthetics industry.” Therefore, Yuanmei aims to fundamentally help institutions improve efficiency and reduce costs while enabling more precise client matching, as well as helping clients identify the institutions, services, and products best suited to their needs. This vision underpins the company’s current positioning as a curated platform for medical aesthetics.

In the past, we consistently focused on industry pain points such as information asymmetry and the difficulty institutions faced in customer acquisition. With the rise of medical aesthetics platforms, these issues are steadily improving.

However, Ma Jiayuesheng believes that existing medical aesthetics platforms still have a long way to go in significantly enhancing value for B-side clients. This entails streamlining the journey from signed channels to product/service education, addressing all user “pre-procedure” concerns, reducing conversion friction points, and ultimately transforming traffic into effective conversions. While optimizing user distribution, Yuanmei aims to help institutions rapidly acquire customers, thereby simplifying hospital administrative operations and allowing them to focus on improving medical standards. He stated that the future goal is to achieve a 90% conversion rate among beauty-seeking users.

Yuanmei’s strategy is to “make medical aesthetics transparent and simple.” Of course, for beauty seekers, high-quality medical services remain the core. Therefore, Yuanmei ensures service quality on the supply side and builds its brand by rigorously selecting medical aesthetic institutions and SKUs. Furthermore, as individuals born in the 1990s and 1995s gradually become the main force in medical aesthetic consumption, traditional channel models targeting those born in the 1960s and 1970s are becoming increasingly ineffective. Transparency in pricing and processes is a major trend. This approach fundamentally helps B-side institutions rapidly iterate and upgrade, standardize service procedures, and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the industry. Committed to delivering genuine “quality services,” Yuanmei embraces change while upholding the essential nature of medical care, pledging to grow together with the industry.

Regarding the current competitive landscape, Ma Jiayue of Yuanmei believes that although Yuanmei is an early-stage startup with a relatively small scale, the Chinese medical aesthetics market offers immense potential and abundant opportunities. The true barrier enabling Yuanmei to accumulate strength for future breakthroughs lies in its focused dedication and deep cultivation of the industry. “We maintain absolute openness; though small in size, we are indeed ‘Ant-Man.’”

Regarding potential competitors in the industry, Ma Jiayue of Yuansheng believes that the true rivals are not early-moving third-party internet medical aesthetics companies, but rather capital investors such as Matrix Partners China. From a certain perspective, the future IPOs of medical aesthetics platforms do not pose a threat to Yuanmei; they may even be beneficial. As capital attention toward the medical aesthetics sector increases significantly, the industry’s “tipping point” is expected to truly arrive. At that time, the perspectives from which capital and the market evaluate the medical aesthetics industry will undergo more profound changes, allowing only those business models that genuinely resolve consumer concerns and empower industry evolution to “stand out.”

Founder Ma Jiayuesheng stated that over the past year, Yuanmei has restructured its organizational framework and optimized its business model. The company has appointed partners with extensive experience in internet product development, primary market finance, and brand strategy consulting as Vice Presidents, establishing a “Strategic Information Capital Department.” This department leverages financial expertise to conduct an in-depth analysis of current market conditions and opportunities, formulating a strategic adjustment principle of “staying just slightly ahead of the market” to avoid working in isolation. Additionally, the former CEO of a Series B SaaS service provider in the medical aesthetics industry has joined Yuanmei as Head of Technology, enhancing the operational management of carefully selected partner institutions.

Yuanmei has completed the formation of its new team. The founding members have previously served at renowned enterprises such as Baidu, Ganji.com, Ogilvy, TusStar, Zhi Lifang, and Leo Burnett, bringing over a decade of experience and extensive networks in the medical aesthetics industry. The team is predominantly young, with an average age profile spanning those born between 1985 and 1990.

Following this round of financing, Yuanmei will penetrate the upstream product supply chain and leverage physicians and KOLs to build branded intellectual property. It will produce in-house short-video content for science popularization that is highly professional, engaging, informative, and authoritative, aiming to educate users and assist in product selection. By integrating conversion strategies within the “Beauty Research Lab” scenario, Yuanmei will provide non-standardized services for non-standardized products within a standardized workflow. The entire process will be integrated with SaaS solutions to comprehensively reduce decision-making costs for end consumers, accelerate transaction cycles, and fully empower the healthy development of B-side partners. For Yuanmei, the completion of a transaction marks the true beginning of its service.

Regarding business progress, Ma Jiayuesheng revealed that Yuanmei’s offline service venue, the “Pretty or Not Research Institute,” is scheduled to open in May this year. Yuanmei will highly replicate the offline consumer experience of medical aesthetics, address the disparity between online and offline consumer experiences, and deliver immediate, “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” services.

The online app, having undergone multiple iterations, is scheduled for its official launch in May of this year. Additionally, the company has completed contracts and SaaS service implementation with 100 carefully selected hospitals (all meeting Grade 3A standards or above), and has onboarded nearly 200 professional physicians along with 20 star doctors onto the platform. Ma Jiayuesheng stated that, leveraging these channels and resources, the target is to reach 500,000 registered users, with an initial cold start of 200,000 high-precision users expected upon launch.

Currently, Yuanmei is seeking angel-round follow-on investment, planning to raise RMB 8 million to expand its data sample size and strengthen team building.