Mingyi Chuanshi Secures RMB 100 Million in Series B Funding to Expand Its SaaS-Based Medical Education Platform with Exclusive Video Courses

Chen Jin, Founder of Mingyi Chuanshi

Founded in 2014, Mingyi Chuanshi now occupies an entire two-story office building, converted from an old factory, in the Mengya Creative Industrial Park in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, and employs more than 200 staff members.

During VCBeat’s interview with Chen Jin, founder of Mingyi Chuanshi, an investment bank was also discussing the company’s next round of financing. It was revealed that Mingyi Chuanshi completed its angel round and Series A financing in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and is currently negotiating a Series B round of approximately RMB 100 million.

Just a few days ago, industry leaders began proclaiming the arrival of a “capital winter,” yet Mingyi Chuanshi is already preparing to raise RMB 100 million. It seems the Mingyi Chuanshi project has its unique merits. So, what exactly is this “SaaS platform + medical video courses” model?

Before founding Mingyi Chuanshi, Chen Jin launched the “Bio51” website in 2010, a communication platform that entered the field of biomedical research through video content. It once ranked highly in its niche sector, with traffic surpassed only by DXY and Bioon, and attracted advertising investments from many multinational pharmaceutical giants. However, the website’s business remained on the periphery of the core areas of medical education, making it extremely difficult to monetize end-users, which resulted in the company’s lack of profitability. Therefore, Chen Jin began considering a strategic pivot in 2012.

At the time, another shareholder of the company possessed extensive resources in large enterprises. Chen Jin collaborated with this shareholder to conduct research targeting large corporations, discovering that difficulties in recruitment and training had become widespread pain points. However, since no one was willing to undertake recruitment-related projects, Chen Jin decided to focus on training initiatives. Research across multiple corporate education platforms revealed that employees’ learning behaviors were largely driven by personal preferences. Meanwhile, executives in human resources or training departments at large enterprises commonly reported significant challenges in assessing training progress and effectiveness. For instance, in a company with tens of thousands of employees, even training on rules and regulations—not to mention professional skills training—could take several months to complete.

In light of this situation, Chen Jin’s team believes that internet-based training platforms hold significant promise. At the time, nearly all online education platforms were employee-centric; therefore, they took a different approach by developing a SaaS training platform tailored for large enterprises from the perspective of business owners and managers. The platform has now been successfully integrated into relevant promotion projects under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and is expected to onboard more than 10,000 enterprises this year.

Taking this SaaS training platform for industrial enterprises as a blueprint, could he re-enter the field of medical education, which interested him most? In the second half of 2014, Chen Jin began to reflect anew.

By a fortunate coincidence, in August 2014, the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) issued the “Work Plan for Comprehensively Enhancing the Comprehensive Capabilities of County-Level Hospitals.” During the first phase (2014–2017), the NHFPC aimed to select 500 county-level hospitals for focused development. The plan included a detailed checklist specifying which technical capabilities needed strengthening in various departments of these hospitals. At that time, Chen Jin proposed leveraging this checklist to engage authoritative experts in relevant fields to produce video tutorials, providing grassroots physicians with detailed instruction on diagnostic and therapeutic methods. These video courses could then be packaged and hosted on a SaaS platform, offering hospitals an integrated solution. This proposal received unanimous support from shareholders, and based on this momentum, the company secured angel-round investment from the China Health Industry Investment Fund in December 2014.

Throughout 2015, Chen Jin’s team conducted no marketing campaigns, focusing solely on inviting experts, recording videos, and producing content. At that time, the company engaged numerous medical representatives from major pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Novartis to coordinate with experts at large hospitals for the filming of educational courses.

However, getting started is extremely difficult.

First, it was difficult to gain expert recognition for the platform. Since the project initially operated under the name “BioWuyou” website, many doctors were perplexed, believing that biology had little relevance to their practice. This situation did not see significant improvement until July 2015, when the trademark for “Mingyi Chuanshi” was successfully registered.

Second, the filming process is excessively time-consuming. As the platform targets experts and highly renowned, accomplished physicians who have demanding schedules, securing their time for filming is a painstaking, incremental process. On average, it takes two months to film and produce a single video. This slow pace necessitates team expansion to enable the concurrent production of multiple videos. Of the company’s current 200 employees, 150 are dedicated to course production. Throughout this process, professional teams collaborate with experts to design structured curricula. The entire video production workflow comprises 25 standardized steps, ensuring that the valuable insights and core knowledge intended by the experts are comprehensively shared.

To date, Mingyi Chuanshi has produced over 1,000 videos and collaborated with more than 4,000 experts. In terms of content sources, four hospitals, including the Chinese PLA General Hospital (301 Hospital) and Guangzhou Overseas Chinese Hospital, have established institution-wide partnerships. Additionally, 17 national key departments provide content collaboration, including the Department of Urology at Peking University Third Hospital and the Department of Cardiology at Peking University People’s Hospital.

Chen Jin stated bluntly that the existing library of over 1,000 video courses has become the company’s core competitive advantage, making it increasingly difficult for competitors to catch up in terms of content.

Through their video production collaboration, Chen Jin also discovered that the syllabus for standardized residency training overlapped by more than 80% with the checklist in the 2014 policy document aimed at enhancing the comprehensive capabilities of county-level hospitals. This insight once again gave Mingyi Chuanshi a competitive edge.

With the introduction of the new standardized residency training curriculum in 2015, approximately two-thirds of the standardized residency training bases in Guangdong Province have organized training for residents or instructional faculty through the “Mingyi Chuanshi” training platform. The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, a national-level standardized residency training base, was the earliest to adopt “Mingyi Chuanshi” for organizing such training and is now regarded as a benchmark for standardized residency training bases across China. It is reported that this curriculum system may potentially become the national video-based instructional material for standardized residency training in the future.

Although the expansion into the standardized residency training market was an unexpected bonus, the addition of SaaS software and exclusive course content has begun to shape the initial framework of Mingyi Chuanshi’s online medical education platform.

It is mainly reflected at three levels:

1. Establish a training management mechanism for each position;

2. Vertically develop specialized talent;

3. Complete outcome evaluation and establish a comprehensive system, ultimately enabling hospital administrators to achieve effortless management.

The SaaS platform facilitates easy expansion, allowing hospitals to directly import their own content for hospital-wide staff training.

In addition to standardized residency training, Mingyi Chuanshi also collaborates with hospitals and municipal/county-level Health and Family Planning Commissions. For instance, a consensus on cooperation has been reached with the Xiangtan Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission to provide training for village doctors in rural clinics, physicians in township health centers, and doctors in community health service centers. Compared with the previous approach of inviting experts for on-site training, the current model is more time-efficient, cost-effective, and less labor-intensive.

More importantly, the training, assessment, and management of Mingyi Chuanshi are integrated into a unified system: customized assessments ensure the effectiveness of physician training, with results linked to compensation, thereby significantly alleviating the training management burden on hospital administrators.

Currently, there are nearly 3 million licensed physicians in China. According to the plan of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, this number is expected to reach 6 million by 2020. In particular, the implementation of China’s tiered diagnosis and treatment system and the general practitioner training program will significantly stimulate the training market for primary healthcare, offering promising prospects.