Shanhai Innovation Secures Nearly 100 Million Yuan in Series C Financing to Expand Application Areas of Supramolecular Technology | Exclusive Report by 36Kr
36Kr has learned that "Shanhai Innovation" recently received nearly 100 million yuan in Series C financing, led by Yuansheng Venture Capital. Previously, Shanhai Innovation had received strategic investments from industrial giants such as L'Oréal and Bloomage Biotechnology.
The Series C funds will be mainly used for the upgrade and construction of the AI R & D platform for supramolecular new materials; to promote the industrial application of new materials in fields such as health food, medicine, agriculture, and environmental protection; and to expand new energy business, including the development of safe electrolytes, recycling of waste batteries, and recycling of silver powder from photovoltaic silicon panels.
Shanhai Innovation was founded in Shenzhen in 2017 by Zhang Jiaheng, a professor and doctoral supervisor at Harbin Institute of Technology. Currently, it has an innovation and R & D team of nearly 100 people, including more than 10 professors and nearly 30 doctors.
The company applies the "supramolecular technology", which has won the Nobel Prize twice, to fields such as beauty, biomedicine, functional food, and new energy. Through the orderly molecular "intelligent" assembly and modification of raw material components, it realizes the functional upgrade of products.
The founder of Shanhai Innovation once compared supramolecular technology to "building Lego": different chemical species (atoms, molecules, ions, clusters) are regarded as Lego components. R & D personnel use their imagination to assemble them into the desired shapes. During the assembly process, the "Lego" pieces can fit together (and also be separated) through structural matching to form a relatively stable structure (dynamic and reversible), and specific shapes and structures bring specific functions. For example, in the field of skin care products, it can achieve better skin penetration effects and anti - inflammatory and acne - removing functions.
It is reported that Shanhai Innovation has built its own supramolecular algorithm library. Based on the first - principles and ab initio calculations, it analyzes the structural characteristics of components, and uses machine learning and high - throughput screening to find the best molecular ligands. Through the algorithm, it also tries to predict and analyze the performance of supramolecules after their formation, such as stability, solubility, bioavailability, biological efficacy, and toxicity.
Photo provided by the company
Relying on the above - mentioned technologies, it has built a supramolecular "1 + N" material platform. Using technologies such as supramolecular co - crystal strengthening technology, peptide hierarchical self - assembly technology, biological enzyme green catalysis technology, and superconducting synergistic penetration - promoting technology, it upgrades multiple raw material products, such as supramolecular salicylic acid, supramolecular carnosine, glycerol glucoside, and supramolecular copper peptide. Many of these products have been applied to the products of domestic and international beauty brands.
According to Shanhai Innovation, its team started to use AI technology to develop supramolecular raw materials as early as 2008 and published "Theoretical Study of pKa for perchloric acid" in the "Journal of Molecular Structure". In the same year, DeepMind released the protein structure prediction model AlphaFold, which can accurately predict protein structures based on parameters such as intermolecular interactions.
In addition to its application in the beauty scenario, in mid - March, Shanhai Innovation cooperated with Deep Principles, an AI for Chemistry/Materials company, to develop the AI + supramolecular material synthesis matrix - Jianmu™ (SynthrixJIMU). With the AI engine at its core, it tries to realize the full - link of supramolecular material design - simulation - synthesis in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and engineering to accelerate the conversion efficiency of product optimization requirements from the laboratory to the market.
At present, Shanhai Innovation has also applied supramolecular technology to the field of functional food, including functional raw materials such as vitamins, plant extracts, probiotics, and saturated and unsaturated fats. In the directions of environmental protection and agriculture, it has also made a lot of technological reserves, such as developing new targeted adsorption materials to selectively capture micro - pollutants (pesticides, drugs, and harmful chemicals) from wastewater.
In Zhang Jiaheng's view, basic research based on supramolecular technology can build an underlying material development platform to solve problems in multiple industries, rather than focusing on researching single products and marketing. In previous years, Shanhai Innovation mainly carried out technological innovation in the skin care products industry with high gross profit and short commercialization cycle. Now it has expanded into directions such as food and health products and environmental protection materials.
Liu Xiao, the managing director of Yuansheng Venture Capital, said: China is the world's second - largest cosmetics consumer country, and there is a clear demand for domestic substitution of raw materials, with great potential in the future. Relying on the core technology platform of supramolecular modification, Shanhai Innovation has taken the lead in opening up the cosmetics application market, accumulated many leading customers, and occupied the customers' minds. At the same time, we also have high hopes for Professor Zhang Jiaheng, an atypical scientist - entrepreneur, who has unique commercial vision and strategic planning. We believe he can lead the team to provide innovative and high - quality solutions in fields such as general health, agriculture, and environmental protection in the future, and empower the development of the industry.