Autumn's Prime: Six FreeS Fund Early-Stage Portfolio Companies Raise Nearly 1 Billion RMB | FreeS Family Funding News Vol.15
Looking forward to working alongside more outstanding founders.
The "FreeS Family Funding News" column regularly publishes funding updates from FreeS Fund portfolio companies. In addition to new investments, we also cover follow-on rounds for companies we've previously backed. Together, we witness each step of innovative enterprises as they grow from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 100.
This edition at a glance:
- Biotech and pharma: FreeS Fund angel-round project Yanming Biotech completed a RMB 700 million Series A, with FreeS Fund continuing to add; FreeS Fund angel-round project Lukan Medical completed a tens-of-millions RMB Series A; FreeS Fund angel-round project Xinsu Technology completed a RMB 100 million+ Pre-A round, with FreeS Fund continuing to add.
- Hard and soft tech: LightStandard completed an angel round of over RMB 50 million, with FreeS Fund participating; FreeS Fund angel-round project Anpai Xinyan completed a nearly RMB 100 million Series A.
- Consumer and TMT: FreeS Fund Pre-A project SPEEDIANCE closed two consecutive rounds, with FreeS Fund continuing to add.
(This roundup covers only publicly disclosed funding information from July to August, sorted by the date each company's funding news was made public.)
▲ Image source: Yanming Biotech
Yanming Biotech announced the completion of a RMB 700 million Series A round, led by SDIC Venture Capital and co-led by China Reform Fund, with participation from Taiping Healthcare Fund, China Life Science and Technology Fund, and Hetang Venture Capital, while all existing investors including FreeS Fund continued to increase their investment.
/ From the investor /
Since its founding, Yanming Biotech has rapidly established itself as a globally leading scientific platform in innate immunity and tumor immunology, built on solid and efficient scientific achievements and a clear disease translation strategy. The company has made breakthrough progress across multiple novel and highly challenging targets and programs. In addressing unresolved medical challenges worldwide, its scientific contributions carry immeasurable significance for human health and tremendous commercial value. FreeS Fund will consistently support original innovation in China and firmly back Yanming Biotech in writing a new chapter for Chinese pharmaceutical innovation.
/ Company profile /
Yanming Biotech was co-founded by Academician Feng Shao and Dr. Tianjing Deng in October 2020, with the ambition to become a globally leading Chinese biotech company built on Chinese scientists' discoveries and driven by original innovation. Based on Academician Shao's world-leading biological discoveries in innate immunity and pyroptosis, Yanming Biotech focuses on unresolved critical medical problems in inflammation and oncology, establishing a technology platform around "molecular switches for pyroptosis and innate immune regulation." Through independent R&D and collaboration with leading domestic and international medical translation institutions, the company is dedicated to developing revolutionary innovative drugs for inflammation and cancer, bringing China's original innovations to patients worldwide.
Currently, Yanming Biotech has achieved breakthrough progress across multiple programs including pyroptosis inhibitors and innate immune modulators. Among these, an innate immune agonist is expected to enter clinical stages in 2023, while a pyroptosis inhibitor is nearing clinical candidate compound selection, with clinical entry anticipated in 2024.
(See full coverage: Yanming Biotech Announces Completion of RMB 700 Million Series A Financing)
▲ Image source: Lukan Medical
Lukan Medical announced the completion of a RMB 35 million Series A round. This round was led by Tongde Capital, with participation from Shanghai Xinyoutuo Enterprise Management Co., Ltd.
/ From the investor /
In the healthcare industry, ultra-minimally invasive surgery can enhance physicians' effectiveness while dramatically reducing patient trauma and recovery time. Despite the changes and challenges the medical consumables sector has faced in recent years, we remain very bullish on the prospects of the "ultra-minimally invasive" track and believe ultra-minimally invasive instruments represent one of the future directions for surgical consumables. We expect this financing to help Lukan Medical bring more innovative medical device products to clinical application.
/ Company profile /
Lukan Medical is a manufacturer of laparoscopic instruments and equipment, with main products including endoscopes and auxiliary surgical instruments for various departments. The company is also committed to developing minimally invasive concept instruments and laser surgical energy devices, providing advanced instrument equipment for the medical and surgical fields.
Since its founding, the company has adhered to a surgical development philosophy of "minimizing trauma," starting from "ultra-minimally invasive" and gradually expanding to full-category surgical products. It is dedicated to developing "ultra-minimally invasive" innovative medical devices that meet clinical needs. From product concept development to sample production, and through deep collaboration with physicians in later commercial development, the company has addressed the disconnect between R&D and production and the separation between clinical practice and manufacturers in the medical industry, truly achieving "from the clinic, to the clinic" with integrated industry-academia-research-medicine development.
(See full coverage: Lukan Medical Completes RMB 35 Million Series A, Led by Tongde Capital)
▲ SPEEDIANCE commercial Zongshi series products
Image source: SPEEDIANCE
Smart fitness brand SPEEDIANCE closed two consecutive funding rounds totaling RMB 50 million, led by Yuanhe Origin and Haiyi Capital, with FreeS Fund and Rongda CVC participating.
/ From the investor /
Post-pandemic, consumers' attention to health has continued to rise, and the market for the broader wellness sector — particularly fitness — has maintained rapid growth. SPEEDIANCE aims to use technology to iterate on the ancient fitness industry, digitizing and intelligently transforming strength fitness equipment that hasn't seen major changes in decades. We believe this direction holds significant potential going forward.
Currently, SPEEDIANCE has established strong product positioning across multiple scenarios including home and gym settings. Meanwhile, in mature overseas fitness markets such as the US, SPEEDIANCE has also been able to effectively penetrate the existing high-end fitness demographic, providing digitized and intelligent strength fitness tools and content, achieving rapid market growth. We look forward to SPEEDIANCE's longer-term development in the future.
/ Company profile /
SPEEDIANCE was founded in December 2020, dedicated to driving digitization, mass adoption, and platformization in the fitness space, exploring healthier lifestyles together with users. At the end of 2021, its first product debuted on the overseas crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, with an average price of $2,100 and nearly $600,000 raised, becoming the platform's only digital strength fitness product. Unlike traditional fitness products using physical weights, SPEEDIANCE's home fitness products achieve digital weight through direct-drive motors. The team has mastered core technologies in drive circuit design and algorithm control, forming an important foundation for continued product iteration.
(See full coverage: Smart Fitness Brand "SPEEDIANCE" Closes Two Consecutive Rounds, Aiming to Make Fitness Easier Through Digital Equipment)
▲ Image source: LightStandard
LightStandard, an optical computing chip R&D platform based on innovative phase-change material applications, completed an angel round of over RMB 50 million, with FreeS Fund participating.
/ From the investor /
FreeS Fund has long been bullish on and continuously investing in the photonics field. As a carrier with both information and energy transmission capabilities, light has broad application prospects in processing, imaging, and computing. Regarding computing specifically, as application demands pursue ever-greater computing power, electronic chips are gradually approaching physical limits. Optical computing has the potential to break through the limitations of traditional computing chips in high-speed computing, particularly in artificial intelligence, becoming a foundational next-generation computing technology.
LightStandard, through its R&D and application of novel optical modulation methods, demonstrates tremendous application potential in optical computing, communications, and other fields. Under the major trend of optical replacing copper, we both hope and believe that LightStandard can become a leading enterprise in all-optical information systems.
/ Company profile /
LightStandard was founded in 2022, aiming to empower next-generation applications through optical computing. The company focuses primarily on producing and developing optical computing chips and optical computing boards for scenarios with high AI computing power demands, such as large model inference and training, autonomous driving, smart cities, quantitative finance, and AI security. The company's first-generation optical computing chip has already been validated, and it is accelerating the commercialization of optical computing chips.
The LightStandard team comes from world-leading universities including Oxford University, University of Chicago, Fudan University, and Chinese Academy of Sciences. The research team's papers have been cited 6,227 times collectively, with results published 7 times in Nature's main journal, as well as in photonics and nanotechnology.
(See full coverage: "LightStandard" Completes Angel Round of Over RMB 50 Million, Focused on Optical Computing Chip and Board R&D)
▲ Image source: Xinsu Technology
Xinsu Technology announced the completion of RMB 100 million+ Pre-A and Pre-A+ rounds, with participation from Green Catalyst Capital, Fosun Pharma's Fosun Health Capital, Alibaba Health Information Technology Limited, and existing angel-round investor FreeS Fund.
/ From the investor /
Congratulations to Dr. Xin Zhao and the team for completing a substantial financing round against the headwinds. We believe that integrating semiconductor technology with biotechnology is an effective path to disruptive innovation. In just two years since FreeS Fund's angel investment in Xinsu, the company has accelerated rapidly, achieving breakthroughs in high-throughput short-chain DNA synthesis and long-chain splicing chips, with initial commercial traction. We look forward to Xinsu's future impact across the broad tracks of synthetic biology, agriculture, sequencing, and pharmaceuticals.
/ Company profile /
Xinsu Technology's vision is to use semiconductor technology to build infrastructure for the molecular biology era, dedicated to high-throughput synthesis and detection of DNA, RNA, proteins, and peptides, driving order-of-magnitude reductions in the cost of synthesizing biological macromolecules like DNA, facilitating AI-driven paradigm shifts in biological R&D, and enabling key frontier application industries including synthetic biology, biomedicine, and DNA information storage. The company drives forward development through "independent and controllable core technology R&D," "matrix-style design of innovation units," and "innovative exploration in frontier fields and interdisciplinary domains" as core competitive strengths.
(See full coverage: "Xinsu Technology" Secures RMB 100 Million+ Pre-A Round, Molecular Chips Drive High-Throughput DNA Synthesis)
▲ Anpai Xinyan products: (top left) IQ modulator; (top right) ultra-high-speed thin-film lithium niobate optical modulator chip; (bottom) 40GHz/60GHz intensity modulators; Image source: Anpai Xinyan
Anpai Xinyan announced the successful completion of a nearly RMB 100 million Series A round. This round was jointly led by Tongchuang Weiyue and Xia Chuang Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Wuhan Jiangxia Technology Investment Group (a partner of Tongchuang Weiyue), with participation from Yuan Chuang Duoying, Yunqi Capital, and others.
/ From the investor /
The Anpai Xinyan team has accumulated more than a decade of experience in thin-film lithium niobate photonic devices. Now, their products have finally moved from the laboratory to the new battlefield of marketization and industrialization. We also look forward to their proving their industrial and market value in fields such as laser communications, lidar, and microwave photonics.
The optical communications market is vast. Whether in backbone communication networks, 5G cellular networks, or AI data center construction — both domestically and globally — laser communications are indispensable. And optical modules are undoubtedly among the most critical core components.
Thin-film lithium niobate is an optical piezoelectric material discovered in recent years. Compared to other optical device materials, thin-film lithium niobate achieves lower insertion loss, better piezoelectric effects, and higher communication rates. What makes us even prouder is that China is at the world's leading position in thin-film lithium niobate material manufacturing and the design, development, and production of optical devices. What we need to do is no longer catch up from behind, but continue to maintain technological leadership and commercialize and marketize that technology.
Anpai Xinyan has already become a standout in thin-film lithium niobate device design and manufacturing, having developed numerous ultra-high-speed optical modulators and other devices, established its own optical device production line, and formed strong cooperative relationships with major upstream and downstream industry players.
As investors, we are confident in the future of both the thin-film lithium niobate industry and Anpai Xinyan, and we look forward to more and more original innovative technologies and teams emerging in China to make greater contributions to industrial upgrading.
/ Company profile /
Anpai Xinyan is an innovative company focused on the R&D and production of thin-film lithium niobate photonic chips and optical engines. The company currently conducts chip and device R&D, wafer fabrication, packaging, and sales primarily through its wholly-owned subsidiary Wuhan Anpai Optoelectronics Co., Ltd. Products are widely used in optical communications, data centers, consumer electronics, security, automotive electronics, and other fields.
(See full coverage: Anpai Xinyan (ANPI) Completes Nearly RMB 100 Million Series A)
▲ Ascending to new heights in summer, 7 companies announce funding | FreeS Family Funding News · Vol 11
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