Xinyun Medical Closes Tens of Millions of RMB in Series B+ Funding Led by Dalton Venture, Building Innovative Devices and Neuromodulation Solutions for Chronic Pain | Dalton News
AI is emerging as a new engine for breaking through in pain treatment
Background
Recently, Beijing NewCloud Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "NewCloud Medical"), a comprehensive solutions provider of innovative chronic pain devices, announced the completion of its Series B+ funding round. This round was led by Dalton Venture. The proceeds will be primarily used for continued R&D and iteration of the company's core products, advancement of clinical trials, expansion of commercialization, and team and technology platform development.
Chronic pain, recognized as an independent disease, affects over 300 million people in China, with the affected population trending younger. The market demand is enormous — the domestic pain market is projected to exceed 500 billion yuan by 2025. Meanwhile, the chronic pain treatment field urgently needs new concepts and solutions to break through the limitations of traditional drugs and surgery, filling a vast amount of unmet clinical needs.
Against this backdrop, NewCloud Medical announced the completion of its Series B+ funding round, led by Dalton Venture.
Founded in 2016, NewCloud Medical focuses on using medical technology to address pain points in chronic pain treatment. Through an integrated "industry-academia-research-medical-application" model, it drives continuous innovation across its product pipeline. From non-invasive transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation devices to minimally invasive interventional devices and active implantable devices, multiple products have broken foreign companies' technology monopolies in related fields, achieving revolutionary breakthroughs in frontier technologies such as AI closed-loop spinal cord stimulation. These advances will provide chronic pain patients with precise, safe, and effective treatment options. This funding round brings new capital support to NewCloud Medical and once again validates the capital market's confidence in the company's commercialization capabilities.
Lin Zhencheng, Partner at Dalton Venture, stated: "As an aging society accelerates, demand for chronic pain diagnosis and treatment is growing rigidly. NewCloud Medical has long been deeply rooted in the pain field. With differentiated technology deployment and efficient product development capabilities, it has developed multiple innovative pain management devices, such as closed-loop spinal cord stimulators and ligamentum flavum resection minimally invasive kits, significantly improving the accessibility of advanced pain treatment technologies. We firmly believe that NewCloud Medical will continue to bring breakthrough solutions to the industry, and we will accompany the company over the long term to drive innovative products to the global market."
Addressing Unmet Clinical Needs
Chronic pain encompasses conditions such as postherpetic neuralgia, chronic lower back pain, and diabetic neuropathic pain. As societal aging intensifies, its incidence continues to rise, imposing heavy burdens on society and individuals. In the United States, the annual burden caused by chronic pain reaches $635 billion, far exceeding that of cardiovascular disease and cancer. In China, chronic pain-related disease hospitalizations reached 26.15 million cases in 2023, with pain department admissions alone increasing by 35.1%.
"From the perspective of human development, pain is an eternal topic, especially as people's quality of life improves, making the pain problem particularly prominent. Chinese companies applying frontier technologies to solve pain problems can help reduce social burdens and family expenditures," said Zhao Yun, founder and CEO of NewCloud Medical, on the significance of targeting the pain sector.
National emphasis on pain management is also increasing. Since 2023, comprehensive pain management models have been promoted nationwide, alongside pain department construction. According to incomplete statistics, pain department coverage in tertiary hospitals has reached 92.7%. Chronic pain has also been incorporated into chronic disease management alongside hypertension and diabetes.
However, a clear paradox exists in the chronic pain field: despite hundreds of treatment methods being proposed, some patients still fail to achieve effective pain relief. Take neuropathic pain as an example — as a common refractory pain type, it is primarily treated with drugs, yet approximately 50% of patients cannot achieve adequate pain relief. The potential market for pain treatment is vast, and more effective analgesic methods are clinically essential. NewCloud Medical addresses clinical pain points by deploying a series of products with technological differentiation advantages in minimally invasive intervention and neuromodulation, further improving clinical analgesic efficacy.
Product Capabilities: AI as the New Engine Breaking Through Pain Treatment
Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) is the most commonly used neuromodulation technology for pain treatment. By placing electrodes in the epidural space of the spinal cord, it uses electrical current to stimulate the spinal cord, blocking pain signals from reaching the brain and thereby achieving pain relief. Compared with drug therapy, SCS offers advantages such as reversibility and absence of side effects, making it one of the core technologies in pain departments. Currently, annual SCS procedures in China number approximately 2,000 (with a permanent implantation rate of about 20%-30%), compared to 50,000-70,000 annual implantations in the United States (with permanent implantation rates exceeding 60%). The room for penetration improvement is significant.
However, the global SCS field is almost monopolized by foreign giants (such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and Abbott), with closed-loop technology — representing the industry frontier — protected by formidable barriers. Existing open-loop SCS systems in China, due to fixed output stimulation and reliance on manual subjective parameter adjustment, struggle to adapt to patients' stimulation needs during daily activities, resulting in relatively low and unstable clinical efficacy.
With rapid technology iteration, especially the leapfrog development of AI in healthcare, NewCloud Medical seized the opportunity. By deeply integrating AI and spinal cord interface technologies, it innovatively developed China's first "AI closed-loop implantable rechargeable spinal cord stimulation system, NewStim®." NewStim® features systematic upgrades at both hardware and software levels. It can automatically adjust stimulation parameters based on real-time measurements of evoked compound action potential (ECAP) signals, maintaining the number of nerve fibers activated by electrical pulses in the body's pain region at an appropriate level, ensuring patients receive stable and effective pain relief across different postures and activities.
The emergence of NewStim® breaks the long-term foreign monopoly on frontier SCS technology, heralding that Chinese SCS technology has entered world-leading ranks.
On why closed-loop technology was chosen, Zhao Yun explained: "We want to maintain an open mindset, stay at the forefront of technology, and improve efficacy and quality of life. Spinal neural signals are an important 'data pool' for the human body. Using AI closed-loop technology to sense neural signals, we can listen to the interactive dialogue between electrical stimulation and the spinal cord, enabling precise regulation. This signal measurement can exceed 4 million times daily, meaning even slight changes from breathing, heartbeat, and other activities can be sensitively captured, achieving precise and individualized pain treatment."
Furthermore, patients previously had to return to the hospital regularly for parameter adjustments after permanent SCS implantation. With AI support, third-party platforms and hospitals can efficiently conduct preoperative planning and postoperative management for patients, with real-time parameter adjustments completed remotely, effectively reducing physician workload and improving patient treatment compliance. On another front, AI's greatest contribution to closed-loop SCS systems lies in its ability to use population data to continuously accumulate sample libraries, complete model library construction, and ultimately feed back into the AI model for continuous system iteration.
Beyond neuromodulation products, NewCloud Medical's self-developed "single-use lumbar spinal stenosis minimally invasive decompression kit, NewMild®," is China's first device for performing percutaneous image-guided lumbar decompression (PILD) surgery. Clinical trials for this product have launched at the most influential pain departments in domestic hospitals, meaning NewCloud Medical provides important technical support for formally introducing PILD surgery to China, benefiting more lumbar spinal stenosis patients.
PILD surgery performed with NewMild®
"Our innovation in R&D lies in the application of the industry-academia-research-medical-application model, which is also our core competitiveness," Zhao Yun introduced. The so-called "industry-academia-research-medical-application" model involves deep collaboration with renowned domestic and international hospitals, universities, and research institutions, creating a "five-in-one" model of scientific research-driven development, engineering R&D translation, industrial application, clinical validation and feedback, and user scenario orientation — to ensure sustained innovation capabilities and market advantages. Currently, NewCloud Medical has jointly undertaken the Beijing Science and Technology Plan project "AI Closed-Loop Implantable Spinal Cord Stimulator R&D" with the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Electrical Engineering and China Rehabilitation Research Center, and has collaborated with Beijing University of Chemical Technology on developing multiple new medical materials.
Strategic Layout: From Local to International
Against a globalization backdrop, "going global" is an inevitable trend for Chinese enterprise development, and it is also part of NewCloud Medical's future plans. Following this funding round, the company will focus investment in the following directions:
1) Product pipeline: Advance R&D progress for NewStim®, NewMild®, and other products, further expanding the technical coverage of neuromodulation products (such as peripheral nerve stimulation products), and driving product registration and market approval through innovation channels (special review channels for medical devices);
2) Technology depth: Based on the principle of "don't disperse, specialize and excel," concentrate advantages to build precise chronic pain management products;
3) Globalization: Drive neuromodulation products to conduct clinical trials and registration in the United States, bringing domestically produced pain treatment devices to the world stage.
In the future, NewCloud Medical also hopes to gradually establish patient and physician pain education systems globally, improving public awareness of pain and treatment options. "The development of this industry is closely related to education. If people realize they shouldn't endure pain and learn about good technologies for treating it, the entire industry can develop further. So our mission is 'committed to providing products and services for humanity to be free from pain' — this isn't just about providing products, but also integrating education and other services to truly do a good job of 'being free from pain,'" Zhao Yun elaborated on the meaning behind the company's mission, with greater "ambition" for the future — to become a standard-setter and ecosystem leader in the chronic pain field.
ID: daltonventure
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