Beijing-based medical startup WeMed has closed its Series C+ round, bagging RMB 100 million (USD 14.6 million) from sole investor GL Ventures, Hillhouse Capital’s early-stage VC arm, the company confirmed to KrASIA on Thursday.
Founded in 2014, WeMed has rolled out a slew of imaging equipment such as digital subtraction angiography (DSA) technologies that help doctors detect blood problems.
Beijing Tiantan Hospital and The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University are among the large centers that have adopted WeMed’s products, replacing older DSA machines that were imported years ago, founder and CEO Yang He told KrASIA. He said that the major clients are smaller hospitals, which have no such equipment at all.
While the DSA machines are serving “like doctors’ eyes” to see the abnormalities in blood vessels, his company has been testing a robotic-assisted system that executes—like a doctor’s hands— minimal invasive vascular therapy procedures. WeMed is waiting for the necessary licenses to go to market.
“When developing our DSA products, we are mainly catching up with international peers, but as for our robots, we are leading,” Yang said, explaining that only few companies globally are making efforts in this niche. US-based Corindus Vascular Robotics, which was bought by Siemens for USD 1.1 billion in 2019, and France-based Robocath are the major ones.