AI + healthcare player Synyi AI raised CNY 250 million (USD 36.38 million) in its Series C round of financing, led by Tencent and followed by Sinopharm Capital.
AI + Healthcare service platform. Photo: Credit to Unsplash.
On July 3, one of China’s AI + healthcare players Synyi AI (森亿智能) raised CNY 250 million (USD 36.38 million) in its Series C round of financing, led by Tencent and followed by Sinopharm Capital (国药资本). The company intends to use the funding to accelerate the development of AI + healthcare integrated solution, as well as recruit more experts in the field of AI and medicine.
Synyi AI has completed five rounds of funding with a total amount in excess of CNY 550 million (USD 80.04 million). Several reputable global VC firms also invested in the startup before this round, such as Sequoia Capital China, GGV Capital, Zhen Fund, and so on.
Another unique investor is CEC Healthcare Fund (中电健康基金), a state-owned industry investment fund focusing on businesses based on or related to medical big data, such as digital health, new medical technology, life science, health insurance and so on. Currently, CEC Healthcare Fund is an important participant in a government project, which aims to collect medical data from hospitals in different regions of China, as well as clean, reorganize and incorporate all the data into one system. CEC Healthcare Fund is building an investment portfolio ecosystem and Synyi AI is an important part of it.
Founded in 2016, Synyi AI started its business as a medical content structuring platform based on natural language processing (NLP), mainly assisting hospitals to organize the disordered medical records for research use. At present, the company has become an AI +healthcare platform integrating multiple services for medical research.
The business of Synyi AI fits the category of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT), an area promoted by the Chinese government. In many Chinese hospitals in Tier-three or Tier-four cities and rural regions, doctors still hand out handwritten prescriptions rather than entrust this task to the computer database. Indeed, they are in critical need of digitizing their working process. In the hospitals that have already adopted digital medical systems, medical data are stored in different software from different suppliers. It results in the difficulty of merging all the data into one single system, reducing working efficiency and curtailing the potential contribution of the data. For this reason, Synyi AI is making great efforts to solve these problems under the strategy of “AI +HIT”.
According to Synyi AI, the company has provided services to almost 100 tertiary hospitals in China. In the first half of this year, Synyi AI signed cooperation agreements with over 10 hospitals, which helped the company’s revenue to soar 340% over the same period of last year. At present, Synyi AI has a staff of more than 300.