SenseTime Healthcare Secures Another Strategic Investment Worth Hundreds of Millions of Yuan, Post-A-Round Valuation Exceeds 3 Billion Yuan | Exclusive from 36Kr
36Kr exclusively learned that "SenseTime Medical" recently completed a strategic financing of hundreds of millions of yuan in the Pre-A+ round. The investors include Lenovo Capital and Incubation Group, United Capital, Jiuxian Capital, Shenran Investment, etc. At the beginning of this year, SenseTime Medical had received an investment of over 100 million yuan from industrial capitals such as Infore Capital under the Midea Group and Renwei KeFa under the People's Medical Publishing House Group.
According to SenseTime Medical, the company has currently launched the Series A financing. After the investment, its valuation exceeds 3 billion yuan, and the subscription amount for this round of financing has exceeded 500 million yuan.
SenseTime Medical is relying on AI technology and taking the "integration of general and specialized" as the technical path to promote the construction of the "future smart hospital". Its core technology engines include: the large language model for healthcare "Da Yi" and the multi-modal basic model group for medical images.
The "Da Yi" model is based on SenseTime's large language model "Shang Liang" with a scale of hundreds of billions of parameters and is trained with a large amount of high-quality medical knowledge data. It has the capabilities of perception, reasoning, and planning. Currently, this model can cover multiple sub - medical scenarios such as intelligent self - diagnosis, medication consultation, structuring of imaging reports, and clinical decision - making support.
The multi-modal basic model group for medical images covers data modalities such as medical images, texts, and biological information. It can perform tasks such as detection, segmentation, and classification for different image modalities such as radiology and pathology, and support high - efficiency model training with small samples and weak annotations to break through the bottlenecks of few data samples and high annotation difficulty in the medical "long - tail problem".
Zhang Shaoting, the CEO of SenseTime Medical, believes that "in the highly competitive medical AI industry, pure technology can be a first - mover advantage, but it is difficult to be a long - term barrier. With the empowerment of technology, a rich product matrix and an industrial ecosystem supported by capital are relatively difficult to replicate."
Therefore, as early as 2018, SenseTime Medical proposed the platform - based concept of "empowering the whole - hospital diagnosis, treatment, and recovery". Up to now, it has formed practical scenario applications in clinical diagnosis and treatment, intelligent decision - making, patient services, medical research, etc., covering the entire medical process.
This platform - based strategy also meets the implicit needs of hospitals. Many hospitals hope that suppliers can provide products with extensibility rather than installing a dozen software products from a dozen different manufacturers. The Kiang Wu Hospital in Macau is a case in point. The hospital has successively purchased more than a dozen artificial intelligence products from SenseTime Medical over the years.
In order to avoid getting involved in the price war of "standard software products", SenseTime Medical has built a dual - platform system for intelligent agent development and model application production, forming a differentiated advantage of "self - controllable + flexible deployment". Hospitals can not only call on the underlying large - model capabilities but also combine their own advantages to use the dual platforms to produce exclusive models and intelligent agents in specific fields and achieve the upgrade of smart hospitals.
It is reported that after SenseTime Group implemented the "1+X" strategy, SenseTime Medical has carried out independent market - oriented operations, and its commercialization path has gradually become clear: on the one hand, it will continue to focus on large - scale "whole - hospital digitalization" projects; on the other hand, it will radiate standardized software modules to primary hospitals to expand its revenue scale.
"SenseTime has been involved in the medical field for seven or eight years, and the early investment has resulted in a rich product matrix. Independent financing also takes into account the hope of introducing shareholders with resources. Financing is not only for obtaining funds but also for promoting a cooperative ecosystem."
Zhang Shaoting said that in the future, he will continue to introduce industrial partners and financial investors with ecological synergy capabilities to jointly build an AI medical ecosystem and accelerate the digital upgrade of the medical industry.