36Kr Exclusive | The former Xiaotiancai team is developing elderly hardware, entering the home care market, and is about to enter overseas markets.

Author | Qiao Yujie

Editor | Yuan Silai

Hard Kr has learned that recently, the home-based elderly care consumer electronics brand "Yuansheng Intelligence" has completed a new round of Pre-A financing of over 10 million yuan. This round of financing was led by Yinchuang Capital, with Dongkechuang participating. The funds from this round will be mainly used for channel expansion and the continuous iteration of related new products.

Yuansheng Intelligence is an enterprise that Hard Kr has been following for a long time. It was established in 2022 and mainly provides home care products for empty-nest and single elderly people over 65 years old. Deng Longsheng, the founder and CEO of the company, used to be the person in charge of the Xiaotiancai learning tablet product and a partner of Xinghuo Education; Co-founder Fang Shaojie also comes from Xiaotiancai and used to be the person in charge of the Xiaotiancai phone watch and Huohuotu products.

The elderly care brand "Qinlu" under Yuansheng Intelligence launched the Qinlu Z9 elderly care machine at the beginning of 2025 and started sales through all channels. It has now entered a stage of rapid growth.

This year, the company further upgraded the fall prevention model and launched the new D series care machines and the upgraded version of the Z9E.

(Image source/Enterprise)

The new generation of the model uses a large model solution that combines millimeter-wave radar and vision for fall detection. By adopting the hybrid large model fusion technology, it achieves faster and more accurate recognition and response. Currently, the fall detection accuracy of the product has reached the leading level in the industry, and both the false alarm rate and the missed alarm rate are maintained at a very low level.

In addition to the fall recognition and family contact functions, the product can also monitor the heart rate and breathing status of the elderly in real-time based on millimeter-wave radar technology. When the elderly person's heart rate is too low or too high, the system will automatically trigger an alarm and notify the family members.

The D series cancels the screen design, and the price is more affordable. Moreover, according to the different needs for privacy protection, the D1 Plus provides two terminal models, divided into two types of products: "real picture" and "privacy line-drawing protection picture", which respects the privacy and freedom of the elderly as much as possible while ensuring the effectiveness of care.

(Image source/Enterprise)

For the usage habits of elderly users, Yuansheng Intelligence has also carried out a large number of age-friendly designs. For example, considering that most elderly families generally have multiple rooms and some devices may be far from the router, the devices support automatic relay networking to achieve full-house interconnection and coverage.

In addition, the speakers and sound effects of the product have also been customized and optimized according to the hearing curve of the elderly, with more emphasis on low-frequency output to improve the clarity and recognizability of the voice.

In terms of the overseas market, Yuansheng Intelligence is entering markets such as Canada, Malaysia, and Australia through the B2B model and plans to start the overseas Amazon DTC channel in the second half of 2026.

The following is an excerpt from an interview between Hard Kr and Deng Longsheng, the founder of Yuansheng Intelligence:

Hard Kr: What are the difficulties in making hardware products for the elderly?

Deng Longsheng: Children's products are usually bought by parents for their children, while elderly products are more often bought by children for their parents. As independent adults, the elderly have their own needs, emotions, and living habits. How to strike a balance between children and the elderly actually poses high requirements for product design.

We attach great importance to the feedback from front-line users. I myself often call users for follow-up to understand the reasons for returns and their real experiences. Only by truly contacting users can we prevent the team from indulging in self-pity.

There is a very typical detail: Some elderly people once reported that they would worry that other family members connected to the device were "eavesdropping" when chatting with someone under the camera. Subsequently, we specifically added a voice transmission prompt function - as long as the voice transmission is turned on, the device will actively broadcast a prompt sound to avoid "silent monitoring" and minimize family conflicts caused by this.

Compared with children's products, the needs of adults are actually much more complex. In addition to functional needs, they also involve emotional needs, relationship needs between people, and more subtle issues such as a sense of dignity and privacy. These details need to be carefully considered by the team.

Hard Kr: Why do you think the timing is right to make elderly hardware now?

Deng Longsheng: We started our business in 2022. At that time, the entire elderly care industry had just entered the shaping stage. Referring to Japan's experience, when the proportion of the population over 60 years old in a country exceeds 18% and the proportion of the population over 65 years old exceeds 14%, the elderly care industry will enter an accelerated development stage. China did not reach this point until the end of 2022.

The reason why we say that now is a critical time point is that the long-term care insurance will be further rolled out across the country this year. Similar systems are called "nursing care insurance" in Japan and commercial long-term care insurance in the United States. With the promotion of such policies, the entire elderly care market will gradually evolve from the early stage to the middle and late stages, and the industry will enter a stage of high-speed growth.

This just gives us an opportunity. The current characteristic of the track is that "there are product categories but lack of brands", and we hope to take this opportunity to truly make "Qinlu" a leading brand in the industry. This round of financing will be used on the one hand for channel expansion and on the other hand for the continuous iteration of products related to long-term care insurance.

Hard Kr: What other plans does the company have for the future?

Deng Longsheng: Our goal is to be the "Xiaotiancai for the elderly" - a real leading elderly care technology company in the industry. For us, making hardware products is just the starting point. More importantly, we need to continuously build a complete elderly care technology system around the real needs of the elderly.

In the future, we will continue to focus on the home care track and gradually expand more new product lines.

In the second half of this year, we will also launch emergency rescue-related services, including a 7×24-hour online rescue system, to further improve the elderly home care scenario and enhance the response ability and safety guarantee in case of emergencies.