Lianxin Medical Secures RMB 200 Million Series B Funding Led by Gotop Capital to Advance Smart Healthcare Solutions
According to VCBeat (WeChat official account: vcbeat), smart healthcare company Lianxin has announced that it has secured RMB 200 million in Series B financing. This round was led by GTJA Investment, with Source Code Capital participating as a co-investor.
Zhu Shuangquan, Chairman and President of Lianxin, stated: “The Series B financing signifies that Lianxin has gained new partners on its new entrepreneurial journey. During our discussions with GTJA Investment and Vertex Capital, we found their breadth and depth of industry insight to be distinct from those of other investment firms. Their investment in Lianxin represents far more than just capital; it embodies their understanding and perspective on the healthcare industry, as well as their expectations and ambitions for its future.”
Lianxin is a high-tech enterprise that stays close to clinical practice, providing products and services for doctors, nurses, patients, and hospital management. Starting with the construction of smart wards, it gradually realizes the development of smart healthcare. Lianxin’s core business is closely centered on clinical needs, with a patient- and disease-centric approach. It develops a series of products for hospitals (and other medical institutions), doctors, nurses, and patients, including intelligent hardware, application software, intelligent algorithms, platform software, and medical IoT applications.
Driven by the rapid evolution of IT technologies, shifting customer demands, and innovations in service models, the healthcare informatics industry has progressed from informatization to digitalization, and further toward intelligentization. Unlike traditional Health Information Technology (HIT) vendors, Lianxin adopts a business model centered on smart medical technologies and services. This model integrates hardware and software through a combination of intelligent devices and application software, underpinned by the practical implementation of emerging IT technologies such as big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile internet.
According to data released by the National Health Commission, as of May 2018, there were 996,000 medical and health institutions nationwide in China, including 12,145 public hospitals and 19,461 private hospitals. The total number of registered nurses in China was approximately 3.8 million, with a ratio of 2.74 nurses per 1,000 population—a figure that lags significantly behind those of developed countries. Driven by multiple factors, including relatively scarce medical resources, a severe shortage of nursing staff, the impetus from technological innovation, and supportive policies, the cross-disciplinary application of advanced technologies to clinical practice to advance healthcare through technology will be the direction of medical innovation. The demand for intelligent nursing care will continue to grow, fostering a market valued at hundreds of billions of yuan.
Lianxin entered the field of intelligent nursing early on, capitalizing on its emerging momentum, and has since been deeply committed to advancing this domain. From its initial handheld mobile nursing terminal product, the NDA, the company now boasts a comprehensive portfolio covering key technologies and products in intelligent nursing, including mobile nursing terminals, closed-loop infusion management, mobile medical/nursing workstations, intelligent vital signs acquisition, smart medication cabinets, perioperative closed-loop management, in-hospital Bluetooth IoT, early patient condition assessment systems, and intelligent nursing decision support systems. This has culminated in a fully integrated hardware-software “Smart Nursing” solution.
Image provided by Lianxin
In addition to intelligent nursing, Lianxin’s product portfolio primarily encompasses intelligent assisted diagnosis and treatment, intelligent operating room management, intelligent medication management, IoT management platforms, and chronic disease management.
Intelligent Assisted Diagnosis and Treatment: The integrated hardware-software solution combining the UnionNew Mobile Doctor Cart and the UnionNew Clinical Medicine, Education, and Research System. The mobile doctor cart is equipped with the Clinical Medicine, Education, and Research System, which leverages cognitive algorithms to process vast amounts of clinical big data, enabling precise and efficient data retrieval. By integrating patient information with an evaluation framework for therapeutic efficacy and treatment plans, the system provides recommendations and support to physicians, facilitating intelligent diagnosis, treatment, and scientific research.
Image provided by Lianxin
Intelligent Operating Room Management: A Patient-Centric, Full-Process Closed-Loop Approach. From a nursing perspective and leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT), this system utilizes NDA-based scanning and rapid documentation to intelligently manage patient transport, consumable usage, and medical record keeping throughout the entire surgical procedure, thereby maximizing operating room safety and operational efficiency. By implementing closed-loop management at critical nodes, it standardizes surgical workflows, strengthens surgical oversight mechanisms, and enhances the enforcement of core perioperative safety management protocols, ultimately reducing the incidence of perioperative errors and achieving the goal of safe surgical patient management.
Intelligent Medication Management: Smart medication cabinets are deployed in ward areas to manage drug dispensing and control front-end processes. NDA barcode scanning ensures accuracy in medication preparation and administration, while intelligent infusion monitoring records drip rate changes throughout the entire infusion process. Non-contact vital signs monitoring systems continuously track patients' heart rates and respiration, effectively preventing adverse drug reactions. With medication safety as the core objective, drugs enter the hospital through logistics channels, proceed to the pharmacy via an electronic barcode scanning system, and are then transferred to ward areas before being administered by nurses to patients. This establishes a closed-loop management system across the entire workflow, enabling comprehensive monitoring and full traceability.
Image provided by Lianxin
IoT Management Platform: A Bluetooth-based IoT system centered on BlueBridge serves as a supplement to the hospital’s existing backbone information network and represents a key technological component of smart hospital infrastructure. It enables the connectivity of numerous micro-scale smart devices, thereby facilitating the collection of ubiquitous long-term monitoring data into true big data. The integration of people, objects, information, and data enhances the intelligent management of doctors, nurses, patients, and in-hospital equipment, including patient access control and location tracking within wards, emergency alerts among medical staff, and remote dynamic management of medical devices.
Image provided by Lianxin
Currently, Lianxin’s launched product lines are sequentially securing leadership positions in their respective niche markets, thereby establishing the core ecosystem for building smart hospitals. Lianxin’s sales network covers more than 6,000 hospitals across China, having successfully provided products and services to over 600 hospitals, more than 60% of which are Grade A tertiary hospitals.
China has an elderly population of over 200 million, including 40 million disabled seniors, with an annual increase of 10 million in the elderly population. For specialized vertical rehabilitation management of severe chronic diseases, a conservative estimate covers 100,000 patients annually (approximately 0.5% of the elderly population).
As one of Lianxin’s strategic development directions, chronic disease management currently focuses on diabetes as its breakthrough area. Centered on medical institutions, we collaborate with hospitals to build an intelligent, end-to-end closed-loop management model for diabetes that spans from general practice to hospital-wide care, and from tertiary hospitals to community health centers and patients’ homes. This approach enables the practical implementation of “Internet + tiered diagnosis and treatment” in the management of diabetes as a chronic condition.
“Healthcare is a long-term endeavor, and the barriers to entry in this industry are exceptionally high. Lianxin will not merely be a B2B company providing solutions; we are committed to taking a longer-term view on diseases and patient care,” said Zhu Shuangquan, Chairman and President of Lianxin.
Regarding the investment rationale, Cai Dajian, Chairman of GTJA Investment, stated: “The sector in which Lianxin operates is a nascent and challenging field, lacking clear international benchmarks or leaders. GTJA Investment will join forces with Lianxin to confront this significant challenge, helping the company achieve its strategic objectives and become a globally influential player in the smart healthcare sector.”
Zhuo Fumin, Chairman of Source Code Capital, stated, “The healthcare industry is an evergreen sector with highly concentrated pain points. Source Code Capital has been diligently seeking teams with a spirit of originality, particularly the visionary leaders within them. The leader of Lianxin possesses three ‘hearts’ that are deeply admirable: first, a keen curiosity for new things; second, an unwavering ambition to drive change in healthcare regardless of objective circumstances; and third, the perseverance to delve deeply into the industry and pursue excellence tirelessly. We hope our investment will help Lianxin successfully reach the other side of the ocean.”
On February 28, 2017, Lianxin completed its RMB 105 million Series A financing round, led by CICC Zhide. Liu Senlin, Executive General Manager of CICC Zhide Equity Investment Management Co., Ltd., also attended the signing ceremony as a representative of existing shareholders. During the event, Mr. Liu spoke highly of the achievements made by Lianxin and its management team in the past. He expressed his hope that Lianxin would continue to stay true to its original aspiration in developing its business. He further stated that he was delighted to see Lianxin transform from a company focused on single-product R&D into an innovative enterprise with platform characteristics, noting that its future development prospects are highly promising.