Chinese healthcare technology brand Zdeer（Chinese：左点） (referred to as "Zdeer" hereafter) has completed a new round of financing, exceeding 100 million RMB, on August 15th. The financing was led by Zhongjin Huirong Investment under CITIC Capital and Taihe Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor.
In early 2023, Zdeer secured an A++ round financing from existing shareholders including Tiantu Investment（Chinese：天图投资）, COWINCAPTIAL（Chinese：同创伟业）, and Coumiry Garden venture Capital（碧桂园创投）.With this latest round of funding, Zdeer has raised a total of over CNY 100 million （USD 15.5 million）in two financing rounds in 2023.
Prior to this year, Zdeer had completed three rounds of financing, attracting investment from Tiantu Investment, Hillhouse Capital(chinese：高瓴投资）, Haiquan Fund（Chinese：海泉基金）,CRYSTALSTREAM（Chinese：清流资本）, COWINCAPTIAL, and Coumiry Garden venture Capital. Zdeer's founder, Zhu Jiangtao, stated that the funds from the recent two rounds of financing will be used for product research and development, supply chain, and channel expansion.
Zdeer, headquartered in Wuhan, was established in 2014 and is a technology-enabled healthcare and lifestyle solution provider.
Currently, Zdeer has two major product business segments: technology-enabled healthcare, focusing on solving significant problems for a small number of people (i.e., disease treatment issues) by combining deep market insights with medical innovations; and healthy lifestyle, targeting solutions for common health maintenance issues for the majority (i.e., health preservation issues) by leveraging technological medical barriers. Zdeer aims to establish brand recognition for promoting a healthy lifestyle and focuses on enhancing user brand awareness.
Furthermore, Zdeer has been actively improving its research and development capabilities and technological barriers, with nearly 3,000 independent patent applications and 14 medical device registration certificates in the People's Republic of China. In terms of offline distribution channels, Zdeer primarily adopts a distribution model targeting national large-scale key accounts and retail terminals. In addition, the offline deployment of hearing aids has been initially established, with collaborations formed with multiple pharmacies and the completion of training and business models for offline OTC hearing aid fitting.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the demand for home health consumption has surged. According to a previous report by Alibaba Health Research Institute, in 2022, the proportion of users of health e-commerce platforms for medical devices reached 65.1%, and the scale of online consumption increased by over 30%. Moreover, there was a significant increase in searches for related products with the keywords "home" and "smart," with growth rates of 113% and 70%, respectively.
In terms of overseas operations, Zdeer has established deep partnerships with major supermarkets such as RT-mart（Chinese：大润发）、Walmart（Chinese：沃尔玛）, Wushang（Chinese：武商集团）. The company had global expansion plans from the early stages of brand establishment and has already entered the Amazon and AliExpress platforms, conducting business in North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Zdeer believes that the future development of health consumer brands will follow two directions: lifestyle-oriented brands, such as Lululemon, emphasizing the pursuit of a certain lifestyle, and technology-leading brands, such as DJI and CloudMinds, emphasizing technological advancements. Zdeer aims to strike a balance between the two by combining aesthetics and technology to address long-standing yet underserved needs, such as psychogenic insomnia, for which there are limited solutions in the market.
According to founder Zhu Jiangtao, the demand for health consumer products will continue to grow. On one hand, the aging population is increasing, and the sub-health problems caused by modern lifestyles are becoming more prominent. In the past, the penetration rate of home medical products was low, but the pandemic has accelerated the development of interest-based e-commerce, providing a fertile ground for the emergence of new categories of home medical products.
Some of the leading domestic internet healthcare platforms include WeDoctor（Chinese：微医）, AliHealth（Chinese：阿里健康）, Ping An Good Doctor（Chinese：平安）, and JD Health（Chinese：京东医生）, while international players include Medable, Element Biosciences, and Komodo Health, among others.