IQVIA Makes a Move in China, "Nuoxin Chuanglian" Raises Tens of Millions of RMB in A+ Strategic Round | FreeS Fund Deal News

FreeS Fund angel-round portfolio company Naxions recently announced the completion of a Series A+ round worth tens of millions of RMB, with IQVIA (formerly QuintilesIMS) as the investor.

IQVIA (NYSE: IQV) is a global leader in information, innovative technology, and R&D outsourcing services. Its investment in Naxions marks its first-ever investment in China since entering the market more than 20 years ago. The proceeds will primarily fund talent acquisition, product R&D, and market expansion.

Since its founding in 2015, Naxions has focused deeply on the pharmaceutical industry, applying "data collection + analysis/management tools/business consulting + execution" to drugmakers with the goal of providing digital marketing solutions.

Investor Commentary

FreeS Fund

Email: feng@freesvc.com

From its inception, FreeS Fund has paid close attention to data and solutions projects in the healthcare and pharmaceutical space. While clinical data has attracted considerable buzz, precision and digital marketing in pharma has been a key focus of our investment strategy.

Looking at Europe and the US, driven by tightening regulation and corporate cost-cutting pressures, the pharmaceutical industry in recent years has begun moving beyond traditional innovative drug marketing strategies and tactics, gradually introducing and scaling multi-channel marketing (MCM). At its core, MCM marketing relies on data, data-driven behavioral analysis, and intelligent prediction.

Naxions has demonstrated sharp industry instincts, identifying this market trend at a very early stage. The founder's understanding of the industry, capability in data platform construction, and communication skills with pharmaceutical companies on application solutions are all second to none. We believe the partnership with IQVIA will further accelerate Naxions' growth, pushing pharmaceutical marketing toward greater efficiency, precision, and intelligence.

On the afternoon of July 19, IQVIA North Asia President Mi Zihou (left) and Naxions CEO Ruan Wei (right) attended the signing ceremony.

Beijing Naxions Technology Co., Ltd. (Naxions) recently announced the completion of a Series A+ round worth tens of millions of RMB, with IQVIA as the investor. The proceeds will be used primarily for talent acquisition, product R&D, and market expansion.

Founded in 2015, Beijing Naxions Technology Co., Ltd. has focused on the pharmaceutical industry, specializing in digital marketing solutions for drugmakers. Its vision is to improve pharmaceutical marketing efficiency through big data technology. Naxions applies "data collection + analysis/management tools/business consulting + execution" to drugmakers, using leading big data processing technology and more precise online marketing solutions to help pharmaceutical companies move away from traditional marketing models and build more compliant and efficient digital marketing systems.

Currently, rising cost pressures, continuously introduced policies and regulations, reforms at healthcare institutions themselves, and the growing complexity of the overall healthcare market are driving major transformation and adjustment in the pharmaceutical industry. Some traditional business models — such as marketing built around high-frequency, face-to-face visits by medical representatives — are facing significant challenges. At the same time, as digital marketing becomes more widespread among drugmakers, an increasing number of companies hope to use digital tools to expand more quickly and efficiently into primary care and segmented markets that traditional methods cannot effectively penetrate, beyond just core markets.

Ruan Wei, founder and CEO of Naxions, noted that pharmaceutical companies' marketing pain points are quite pronounced. First, as tiered diagnosis and treatment deepens, primary care markets are becoming increasingly important for drugmakers. Yet in these markets, companies face major return-on-investment challenges: soaring labor costs, strict compliance requirements, and dispersed customers all contribute to low per-capita output, while adding headcount is not a simple solution. Additionally, because first-generation digital marketing was based on limited data and experience-driven solutions with relatively broad audiences and weak connections between marketing events, how to use new technologies to improve marketing efficiency and precision is a challenge many drugmakers face.

"We need innovative approaches to turn these challenges into opportunities," Ruan said. "Naxions has been committed to reconstructing massive, fragmented data into authentic individual perspectives and insights, finding leverage points from the 'true' voice of the market and contextualized user interpretations, to comprehensively improve commercial operational efficiency and enhance healthcare service effectiveness. We call this the 2.0 version of digital solutions."

Naxions starts with data collection, then through data cleaning, computation, and visualization, helps drugmakers more scientifically and at greater scale understand their target physicians' and patients' attitudes and behaviors toward their products. Using this data, pharmaceutical companies can more precisely adjust direction, deliver scientific information, and elevate physician expertise.

IQVIA's investment in Naxions is part of its strategic layout. As a global leader in information, technology, consulting, and R&D outsourcing, IQVIA has been committed to unlocking the value of data, combining it with consulting and other services to form practically meaningful industry insights and solutions from strategy to tactics. IQVIA North Asia President Mi Zihou said, "Innovation is the driving force behind healthcare industry development. Only by using innovative technologies and products to better listen to patients and healthcare professionals can we align with the national strategy of Healthy China. This partnership aims to build localized digital solutions, hoping to better promote transformation and upgrading in the healthcare industry and the practical implementation of Digital China."

As technology develops and data accumulates, 2.0 digital solutions — combining big data, AI, and data algorithms — can provide objective, comprehensive insights for individual audiences, enhancing the personalization, systematicity, and predictability of scientific information delivery while protecting data source security and privacy. The 2.0 solution can help drugmakers better understand disease diagnosis and treatment perspectives among hospital and physician groups, identify unmet patient needs, and assist companies in making "evidence-based, trend-aware, forward-looking" commercial decisions, thereby building a "people-centered, value-first" new healthcare ecosystem.

It is this shared vision that has facilitated the strategic partnership between Naxions and IQVIA. Ruan revealed that IQVIA has been in China for over 20 years, with real-time rolling statistics covering 85% of global pharmaceutical sales data, considered the gold standard for pharmaceutical marketing reference. At the same time, IQVIA has deep pharmaceutical industry expertise — for instance, its accumulated knowledge across different disease areas can help Naxions more rapidly elevate its industry understanding and accelerate product and platform refinement. Following this partnership, the two sides will connect online and offline healthcare data, combining and validating target group behavioral data with sales data to build a 360-degree physician database. This not only expands the breadth and depth of data, but also extends data sources to broader primary care markets. Through the collaboration with IQVIA, the two parties will work together to help drugmakers discover more accurate real-world evidence and maximize the value of data.

On the competitive front, Zephyr Health operates a similar business model providing data services to drugmakers, obtaining physician prescription habits from data exchanges such as IMS Health and Symphony Health Solutions, then processing and cleaning that data. Google Venture is among its investors.