Why Bianjie.AI Secured Tens of Millions in Pre-A Funding from Fosun Tonghao: A Blockchain Case Study in Medical AI

Recently, Border Intelligence exclusively disclosed to VCBeat that the company has completed a tens-of-millions-yuan Pre-A financing round in collaboration with Fosun Tonghao.

Regarding this round of financing, Cao Heng, CEO of Bianjie Intelligence, stated: “We received formal investment intentions from multiple institutional investors, including some offering higher valuations. However, we ultimately decided to partner with Fosun Tonghao due to Fosun’s strategic position and innovation-driven momentum in the healthcare sector. This partnership will provide a broader platform and ecosystem resources for Bianjie’s technological innovations, accelerate the enhancement of medical data value, and better serve every patient and institution.”

It is reported that Boundary Intelligence is an innovative technology company focused on leveraging blockchain to support the distributed analysis and exchange of healthcare data.

Why Choose to Implement Solutions in the Healthcare Industry? Cao Heng believes: “In today’s era, people are unable to break free from the internet services provided by monopolistic IT giants, forcing them to compromise on their privacy concerns regarding personal consumption data. However, the security and privacy of medical data must remain inviolable. This is the core reason why Boundary Intelligence has chosen to deepen its presence in the healthcare sector. In other words, medical data needs to flow, and the pain points surrounding secure privacy protection required for its analysis and exchange are most acute.”

It is reported that Cao Heng holds degrees in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and in Automation from Tsinghua University. She previously served as the Head of Big Data Analytics at IBM Global Research and as the Director of IBM Research’s Shanghai branch. During her 16-year tenure at the IBM Watson Research Center, Cao Heng focused on the research and development of data-driven intelligent analytics systems.

During that period, Cao Heng came to deeply realize that the greatest challenge in developing intelligent analysis systems was not writing algorithms, but rather the fact that data were scattered across various business participants and collaborators, making it extremely difficult to centrally collect them for algorithmic processing.

In 2010, an intelligent analytics product spearheaded by Cao Heng won the prestigious INFORMS Franz Edelman Award. The product forecasts human resource requirements for diverse skill sets and optimizes talent deployment for complex technical service projects. However, it encountered certain challenges while serving the European market.

“Europe comprises many countries, and in quite a few of them, human resource-related data is considered highly private and therefore cannot cross national borders. At the time, I considered adopting distributed artificial intelligence technology to partition the algorithmic models, allowing them to run within each country’s data centers. We would then fuse the non-sensitive intermediate results from these models to achieve overall resource forecasting for Europe and optimize management strategies,” said Cao Heng.

However, at that time, there was no mature blockchain technology to support distributed computing; therefore, although the solution featured a distributed computing architecture, its operational efficiency was extremely low.

In 2016, blockchain technology evolved into its second generation, represented by Ethereum, with geeks shifting their focus to building a distributed world computer. As a tech expert, Cao Heng keenly recognized that blockchain was already capable of supporting more extensive and complex computational demands. Therefore, in December 2016, she decisively resigned to launch her own venture, marking the official establishment of Bianjie AI.

IRIS, the Medical Knowledge Base, and BEAN are the three major product systems of Bianjie Intelligence.

In 2016, when Boundary Intelligence truly embarked on blockchain application development, it found that the technology was still highly immature. At that time, blockchain was predominantly applied in the realm of cryptocurrencies, and its use in supporting genuine distributed business systems was still in a very early stage.

Boundary Intelligence conducted an evaluation of numerous underlying platforms, including Ethereum, BitShares, and Hyperledger, identifying their respective strengths and weaknesses. They later serendipitously encountered Tendermint/Cosmos technology, one of the third-generation blockchain technologies widely recognized within the geek community.

With its sufficient consensus efficiency and clean architecture, Bianjie AI has independently developed a service layer on top of the underlying consensus and cross-chain infrastructure provided by Cosmos.

This service layer provides enterprises with development tools and an application foundation for commercial applications, thereby encapsulating computing capabilities into a service via service interfaces. The mutual invocation mechanism of these services is supported by blockchain technology, enabling more efficient implementation of distributed business systems.

Boundary Intelligence’s BEAN (Blockchain Edge Analytics Network) is a distributed intelligent information analysis and data exchange network based on blockchain technology.

BEAN provides encrypted, distributed intelligent analytics services that safeguard data privacy and respect the rights of data owners. Based on BEAN, Boundary Intelligence has developed applications supporting medical data analysis, enabling semantic-based intelligent extraction of healthcare data on-chain.

These technologies enable the structured processing of unstructured medical data while preserving privacy, making it possible to search, exchange, and utilize data during on-chain distributed business collaboration. “We aim to encapsulate products such as pharmaceutical knowledge bases into intelligent services on the blockchain, thereby supporting the distributed and trusted processing of specific medical data,” Cao Heng told VCBeat.

In the area of DRGs, BorderSmart has also been involved. In this regard, the company has collaborated with Peking University Health Science Center.

Cao Heng stated, “In traditional DRGs, medical professionals often have to manually group medical records. These records are frequently prone to privacy breaches and security issues. By leveraging blockchain technology, BIANJIE Intelligence structures medical records and extracts standardized terminology simultaneously. When hospitals perform DRGs grouping, they do not submit the full text of medical records. Instead, they use a DRGs service client deployed by BIANJIE Intelligence, which runs within the hospital’s Clinical Data Repository (CDR). This client structures the medical records, performs extraction and matching, and transmits the diagnosis codes to the DRGs analysis service.”

At a high level, the relationship among these three products is as follows: The Medical Knowledge Base leverages AI technology to transform information that requires repetitive human cognition into an intelligent knowledge repository; BEAN applies this knowledge base and advanced analytical computations to the processing of medical data; and IRIS institutionalizes and standardizes this computational infrastructure through protocols, enabling its application beyond any single domain, such as finance or healthcare.

Cao Heng stated, “Boundary Intelligence aims to promote the flow of medical data through technology, enabling data exchange in a secure and trusted environment. Therefore, beyond basic data exchange, BEAN will also provide trusted coding and information extraction based on semantic technologies, performing all patient privacy-related computations on the client side to technically ensure the security of hospital data.”

According to her, not all computations need to be performed on the blockchain; a significant portion should be processed off-chain, thereby allowing the blockchain to serve as a trust-enabling link and operate more efficiently.

Meanwhile, every data exchange process should be managed using blockchain technology, thereby ensuring that each computation is traceable, manageable, and auditable.

Only interface data, not raw data, is stored on the blockchain. The data volume of typical interaction interfaces is relatively small; for such data, BIANJING Intelligence directly embeds it as part of the transaction data attributes on the blockchain. When the data volume is large, BIANJING Intelligence stores the data in an encrypted distributed storage network built on IPFS.

In short, Bianjie Intelligence’s blockchain does not store big data; it only stores and interacts with data relevant to transactions.

When discussing the business model, Cao Heng candidly stated, “First and foremost, we are a startup, not a non-profit research institution. Therefore, we will inevitably target scenarios where customers are willing to pay for implementation, ensuring that the commercial value of our technology exceeds its costs.”

At this stage, Boundary Intelligence primarily enables healthcare institutions to efficiently mine clinical pathways through the exchange of medical records. In the realm of commercial health insurance, Boundary Intelligence is actively collaborating with insurance companies.

Due to the opacity of medical data, commercial health insurance currently faces significant risks of adverse selection. In this context, insurers struggle to implement effective risk control, design appropriate products, and accurately target customer segments. Should commercial insurance companies attempt to collaborate with healthcare institutions to collect raw medical data, issues concerning data security would inevitably arise.

The demands of insurance companies have brought opportunities to Boundary Intelligence.

Boundary Intelligence leverages blockchain technology and Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) to focus on specific disease categories. It analyzes the incidence rates of these conditions through DRG-based research and provides corresponding results via integrated analysis, all without compromising the privacy of raw medical data.

Throughout 2017, artificial intelligence was undoubtedly the hottest topic.

“AI companies’ competitiveness in later stages lies more in the dimensions and depth of their scenario integration. Meanwhile, the core competitiveness of blockchain is also an intriguing proposition, as its current rapid development is driven by open-source communities,” said Cao Heng.

According to her view, token economics is a highly efficient design that can be used to encourage technological innovation and the prosperity of open-source communities.

In the past, as technology providers, it was very slow to obtain returns from underlying technologies. With mechanisms like Token in place, the generated value can be efficiently and directly fed back to network contributors (including programmers and network maintainers), which stimulates more people to participate in contributions, thereby accelerating industry innovation and iteration.

Of course, at this stage, the lack of robust regulatory mechanisms and technologies for the token economy has led to erroneous market speculation and hype. This inevitably raises concerns about the potential for bad money to drive out good, which could distort public perception of blockchain technology and adversely impact projects that are genuinely committed to technological exploration.

In this regard, Cao Heng believes that governments around the world will continue to explore and refine corresponding regulatory measures through ongoing learning, ensuring that technology returns to its essence.

Ultimately, blockchain remains in an early stage of development. It requires the public to have a correct understanding and the adoption of more standardized evaluation frameworks, thereby enabling the technology to truly create value in fields such as healthcare and finance.