36Kr Exclusive | A Stanford Ph.D. Develops a Molecular Detection Platform, and the Products Have Entered Peking University and Tsinghua University

Author | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

Yingke learned that Guangzhou Insight Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Insight Technology") recently completed a Pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. This round of financing was led by Lenovo Venture Capital, followed by Lihe Financial and WaNiu Capital. The old shareholders, Tiantu Capital and Yayi Capital, continued to increase their investment. Xinpai Capital served as the financial advisor for this round. The financing funds will be used for the research and development of wafer-level ultra-high-density punching machines, ultra-thin film materials, and commercial gene sequencers.

Solid-state nanopores are a single-molecule sensing platform based on semiconductor technology. Compared with traditional solutions, this technology has a simple structure, does not require complex amplification and labeling steps, and can directly measure the intrinsic physical properties of biological macromolecules. It has great potential in gene sequencing, early cancer screening, and single-molecule analysis.

Insight Technology focuses on the research and development and industrialization of solid-state nanopore single-molecule detection technology. According to Insight Technology, the company has broken through the bottleneck of solid-state nanopore preparation and achieved precise, low-cost, and highly stable controllable preparation of solid-state nanopores with pore sizes ranging from 1 to 100 nm. At the same time, the company has realized the preparation of nanopore arrays on wafers through multi-channel parallel punching, making it possible to move this technology from the laboratory to engineering mass production.

It is worth noting that the engineering implementation of solid-state nanopore technology is expected to reshape the existing molecular diagnosis and gene sequencing market landscape. In high-frequency and rigid-demand scenarios such as precision medicine, infectious disease monitoring, and early tumor screening, its characteristic of "no amplification required and direct single-molecule reading" will significantly shorten the diagnosis cycle and reduce the overall process cost.

In June 2025, Insight Technology launched a new generation of solid-state nanopore detector "SpectAlpha" and supporting intelligent data acquisition and analysis software to the market, completing the technical closed-loop from chip consumables, micro-current detection equipment to analysis software. At the same time, the company has also completed the end-to-end verification of solid-state nanopore DNA sequencing and is currently improving the sequencing accuracy through large-scale data training.

In addition, Insight Technology is promoting the research and development of ultra-thin film materials, aiming to improve the accuracy of DNA sequencing by reducing the film thickness and lay the foundation for protein sequencing. In addition, its solid-state nanopore arrays also have potential application exploration space in the field of brain-like computing (ionic memristive arrays).

In terms of market implementation, within less than a year, Insight Technology's customers have covered more than 30 universities and top-three hospitals such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Peking Union Medical College Hospital. Based on this detection platform, both parties have jointly developed a number of clinical applications, including: rapid pathogen detection without amplification (results available within 30 minutes after sample input), femtogram-level low-abundance protein detection, and cancer methylation detection. At present, the company has completed the verification of nearly a thousand clinical samples, and some products have entered the stage of joint certification.

In terms of the team, the founder and CEO, Zhang Zhong, is a Ph.D. from Stanford University with nearly ten years of experience in chemical single-molecule detection research. The core members of the team are also Ph.D.s from top universities such as Stanford University, Imperial College London, and Peking University, and have published nearly a hundred articles as the first author/ corresponding author in top international journals such as JACS, Adv. Mater., and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (Impact factor: 16.1). In the past year, the company has won industry recognition in multiple science and innovation competitions, including the championship of the National Finals of the 14th China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition's Nanotechnology Innovation Professional Competition, with its technological originality and engineering capabilities.