Tencent leads $36m round for Chinese healthcare AI start-up
Synyi, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up that targets hospitals, has taken its total fundraising to RMB550 million ($80 million) following a RMB250 million Series C led by Tencent Holdings and featuring Sinopharm Capital.
Founded in 2016, the company uses natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining to carry out in-depth analysis of healthcare data on a large scale. The goal is to enable intelligent diagnosis of medical conditions and improve the efficiency of record-keeping and data management by hospitals, research institutes, government departments, and pharmaceutical companies.
Synyi has received orders from nearly 100 tier-three hospitals in China and collaborates with medical research centers at the likes of Shanghai Jiaotong University, Peking University, Columbia University, and Cornell University. It is also part of a national-level healthcare big data project intended to integrate medical information resources.
Since the start of the year, Synyi has accelerated its expansion and started working with Huawei Technologies and CLP Data, a data center subsidiary of Hong Kong’s CLP Group. It launched an intelligent hospital big data center solution with Huawei in March and a hospital information integration platform with CLP Data the following month.
The new funding will go towards ongoing research efforts in medical data management and machine learning, the recruitment of additional AI talent, and general business development, according to a statement released by ZhenFund, which committed RMB10 million in seed funding to Synyi in 2016.
Sequoia led the company’s RMB55 million Series A in 2017 with participation from a healthcare fund operated by CEC Shurong Investment Management, AVCJ Research’s records show. A Series B of RMB100 million, led by GGV Capital, came in early 2018. Sequoia and ZhenFund re-upped. Xianghe Capital then provided an extended Series B that took Synyi’s total funding past RMB300 million.
VC investors have backed numerous Chinese start-ups that use technology to deliver greater efficiencies in healthcare data management and diagnoses. They include Miaojiankang, Airdoc, Zhiyun Health, Huiying, Taimei Medical Technology, and Beijing Infervision. Several of these companies offer AI-powered medical imaging technology.
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