China healthcare big data player pursues US listing

The company has raised several rounds of private funding, including a RMB700 million ($102 million) Series D last September featuring CICC Capital, Youshan Capital, and iFOF, a fund-of-funds launched by China Broadband and the Tianjin municipal government. Other investors include China Investment Corporation – which reportedly put in RMB1 billion in 2018 – and Ally Bridge Group.

NEA, China Broadband, and Temasek are all identified in the prospectus, with stakes of 10.2%, 9.2%, and 11.7%, respectively. Alibaba Group’s healthcare unit owns 8.4%, having accounted for the bulk of a Series D extension in February worth $71.1 million. A further 6.3% is held by North Asia buyout player MBK Partners via its regional special situations strategy.

Established in 2014, LinkDoc claims to be China’s largest data-driven digital infrastructure provider for precision medicine. It works with hospitals on care management for patients with critical diseases, operates an artificial intelligence-enabled (AI) medical data curation system, and supports clinical trials run by pharmaceutical companies.

The critical disease management business has been used by 39,000 physicians in over 330 hospitals to care for approximately 3.5 million patients to date. It specializes in oncology, tracking the treatment process and arranging follow-up calls for patients with physicians as well as in-person consultation through a network of 34 patient care centers. AI diagnostic tools are also supplied to hospitals.

The patient care centers generate most of the disease management platform’s revenue through sales of medication and other services. Service contracts with pharmaceutical companies – which utilize the care centers as a point of sale – and fees charged to hospitals for AI diagnosis and data-driven treatment services represent other revenue streams.

LinkDoc’s various patient touchpoints enable it to accumulate – with patient consent – a vast pool of data. These longitudinal healthcare records, intended to serve as a single comprehensive resource by drawing data from multiple sources, underpin the AI-enabled curation system. The objective is to leverage machine learning to find patterns in healthcare data that can be used to improve personalized patient care and help pharmaceutical companies in their drug development.

This filters through to the third leg of LinkDoc’s business, a data platform that provides real-world evidence used to demonstrate the value of a treatment, matches qualified candidates for enrolment in clinical trials, and handles data collection and verification and on-site monitoring for those trials. As of March, there were 169 active pharmaceutical company users.

The company generated RMB941.6 million in revenue last year, up from $498.9 million in 2019. Over the same period, the net loss widened from RMB552 million to RMB690.9 million. The bulk of LinkDoc’s costs are incurred by the critical disease management business, which must maintain inventories of medication and other products sold through the care centers.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• IPO
• Healthcare
• Technology
• China
• artificial intelligence
• New Enterprise Associates
• Temasek Holdings
• China Broadband Capital
• Alibaba Group
• MBK Partners