Inside Dalton Venture's Portfolio | As Medical AI Surges, Deepwise Health Moves First on a Trillion-Yuan Emerging Market

Inside the Dalton Venture Family

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This Lunar New Year of the Snake, DeepSeek's explosive debut has ignited widespread debate and deep reflection on the future trajectory of artificial intelligence. A new era of AI is dawning.

At the start of 2025, Dalton Venture family company Deepwise announced the completion of a new funding round totaling nearly RMB 500 million — one of the largest AI financings in recent years. As one of China's first digital-intelligent healthcare enterprises, Deepwise's eight-year journey has witnessed every pivotal moment in the nation's medical AI industry.

This round also signals industry and capital's recognition of Deepwise's exceptional performance in medical AI, with expectations that it will maintain its leadership, achieve breakthroughs, and complete the critical migration toward large-scale industrialization of medical AI applications.

01.

From Imaging AI to Omnimodal Intelligence

Like most medical AI companies, Deepwise initially focused on imaging AI as its core strength — improving diagnostic efficiency and accuracy for physicians, effectively expanding medical resource availability while driving China's healthcare system toward digital-intelligent transformation.

There are no shortcuts in imaging AI R&D. To stand out in this赛道, companies must deeply understand genuine clinical needs and develop single-point AI applications as quickly and efficiently as possible to cover more disease types. As clinical adoption deepens, these "single-point" applications must be effectively integrated into efficient, clinically aligned solutions, laying the groundwork for subsequent commercialization.

Across the entire imaging AI赛道, Deepwise's R&D capabilities and demand insight are unmatched. As of 2025, Deepwise holds 14 NMPA Class III certificates, placing it at the industry's forefront, with nearly 200 million annual AI invocations. Common hospital equipment including DR, CT, and mammography machines can all be intelligently empowered, with AI-assisted diagnosis available for high-volume daily screenings of chest, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular, women's health, and pediatric growth and development conditions — making it one of the representative forces of new-quality productive capacity.

However, the digital-intelligent healthcare era cannot rely solely on imaging data. Medical systems contain vast quantities of diverse modal data. To diagnose and make decisions like real doctors, AI companies must build comprehensive models capable of processing cross-modal data to maximize the value embedded in medical information.

Therefore, after establishing its initial imaging AI ecosystem, Deepwise acquired YITU in 2021 to supplement its digital-intelligent processing capabilities for medical big data, creating a dual "imaging + text" AI engine. This expanded its application scenarios from multi-organ, multi-system AI-assisted diagnosis to standardized, systematic research on medical big data, powerfully empowering education and scientific research — thus initiating deeper intelligent precision research for AI in healthcare.

Medicine is a complex and rigorous discipline. Physicians' diagnoses rely not merely on interpreting medical images, but more fundamentally on rich medical knowledge graphs in their minds to comprehensively analyze multimodal data including imaging, laboratory tests, pathology, and genomics, ultimately deriving clinical decisions. In September 2024, Deepwise obtained its 14th NMPA Class III certificate — China's first for an AI lung cancer diagnostic product. This product integrates imaging with clinical physician expertise, trained on tens of thousands of cases with pathological gold-standard data and at least two years of follow-up data, providing benign-malignant differentiation for tiny pulmonary nodules and delivering highly specific AI-assisted diagnostic results. This approval represents a milestone breakthrough in medical AI. AI products have now broken through the constraints of detection and triage, beginning to provide physicians with truly meaningful diagnostic assistance.

We can see that Deepwise appears to be forging a unique development path in medical AI. Technically, it has advanced from single image segmentation to lesion detection and disease diagnosis; product development has evolved from single products to multi-product portfolios to comprehensive solutions; coverage has progressed from single imaging data to complex multimodal data.

This means Deepwise has transformed from a pure imaging AI company into a medical AI enterprise capable of deeply mining the value of multimodal data across healthcare systems, and leveraging this to build a digital ecosystem serving the full process and all scenarios of healthcare.

02.

The Path to Solving Commercialization Challenges

As medical AI continues iterating, numerous hospitals and physicians have fully recognized the value of various AI applications and regard them as daily necessities. Through its dual "imaging + text" AI engine, Deepwise has built the intelligent imaging & big data general platform Deepwise MetAI and the multimodal medical big data platform Deepwise TrioData, currently providing AI services to thousands of institutions.

Unlike most medical imaging AI products, Deepwise MetAI no longer stops at single-sign AI detection and diagnosis. Following physicians' diagnostic logic and workflows, it constructs "full-process, full-scenario AI digital-intelligent" smart departments. Deepwise TrioData emphasizes hospital-wide multimodal big data fusion and governance capabilities, helping hospitals manage high-quality data assets and providing intelligent products and services for management, research, clinical practice, and AI capability building.

The physical examination domain is also an emerging AI imaging application scenario in China. Under the "Healthy China" strategic goal, Deepwise has made early moves, with its established smart health team providing personalized, professional, and intelligent services for major domestic physical examination institutions and users. Its "Ruixin Bao" and "Ruifei Bao" AI intelligent health management solutions have become institutional favorites. The NMPA Class III certificate for its lung cancer diagnostic product provides "Ruifei Bao" with a more professional and intelligent precision health management model in the physical examination domain.

Simultaneously, Deepwise collaborates with grassroots institutions to establish regional cloud imaging centers serving medical community alliances, deploying AI capabilities through telemedicine to township health centers, empowering grassroots medical institutions under initiatives like the "Thousand County Project" and bringing homogeneous smart healthcare to broader populations.

Entering the large model era, Deepwise's medical image general segmentation model SAMI, adapted for multimodal medical data, achieves sub-second segmentation from organs to lesions, pathological cells, diseased tissue, and cellular elements — providing a one-click AI solution for all image segmentation tasks in medical practice.

Deepwise's self-developed R&D capabilities and scientific research strength are industry-recognized, with collaborative research achievements with multiple domestic institutions winning national and provincial science and technology progress awards.

Undeniably, while AI product applications in healthcare have become commonplace, effective pricing models remain elusive at the enterprise level. Large-scale commercialization remains difficult — a challenge all AI companies must confront.

Facing this commercialization challenge, Deepwise's numerous attempts in recent years have proven remarkably effective. Its core team spanning sales and marketing, product R&D, and the Deepwise Research Institute comprises industry elites from diverse fields and backgrounds, together forging strong market competitiveness. With persistent resilience, they have actively expanded application scenarios, creating a multi-scenario, multi-pronged sales model that has grown increasingly mature and achieved notable results. Rising market share in recent years has generated stable cash flow, with overall performance far leading the industry — creating something of an industry miracle.

03.

Medical AI at a New Inflection Point

In November 2024, the National Health Commission, National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and National Disease Control Administration jointly formulated the Reference Guide for AI Application Scenarios in the Health Industry, outlining 84 application scenarios across four domains: "AI + medical service management," "AI + grassroots public health services," "AI + health industry development," and "AI + medical teaching and research." This aims to promote innovative "AI+" application development in the health industry, anchoring the direction for medical AI's future development.

Reviewing Deepwise's development, we are struck by how each step of its product planning seems to precisely align with these scenario guidelines. Perhaps this coincidence is precisely Deepwise's secret to success — difficult for others to replicate. Getting one thing right is hard; getting it right early is even harder.

Taking Deepwise's flagship product Deepwise MetAI as an example, we can see its distinctive product planning approach. Disease diagnosis is a complex workflow, far beyond single-sign detection. Currently, most AI imaging products offer single-point diagnostic functions that can improve physician efficiency at certain steps but have limited impact on overall workflow. If we view disease diagnosis as a mountain marathon, current AI imaging products might help physicians accelerate on certain paths but are powerless at the next stage. AI support for physicians is intermittent — possibly one reason why AI has yet to achieve large-scale commercial deployment, unable to truly support physicians across the complete workflow.

Deepwise MetAI adopts an "AI-integrated full-process" approach, highly integrating multiple needs and applications in physicians' work including intelligent medical image reconstruction, assisted reading and diagnosis, automatic structured report generation, and multimodal data research — truly achieving full-process, full-scenario AI digital-intelligence. It simultaneously possesses high-computing-power, high-concurrency core processing capabilities, intelligently managing departmental GPU resources and dynamically allocating computing power in real-time, constructing a "dual bus" architecture for medical imaging and deconstructed data. This enables physicians to freely call upon data and optimize workflows across screening, diagnosis, treatment, management, education, and research. Deepwise MetAI's relationship with physicians is no longer intermittent support at partial stages, but full-process, full-scenario comprehensive support; it provides full-process AI support for clinical multimodal data collection, governance, research, and application. Deepwise's AI products are becoming the high-tech running shoes for physicians in their mountain marathon — supporting them throughout, always alongside them.

Over eight years, Deepwise has committed to a development path of "making medical AI capabilities infinitely approach real doctors." We believe it will gradually enrich its ecosystem, completing the leap from "useful" to "essential," making AI truly a full-process assistant for physicians.

This Lunar New Year of the Snake, DeepSeek's explosive debut has ignited widespread debate and deep reflection on the future trajectory of artificial intelligence. A new era of AI is dawning. From ordinary users to industry experts, from tech media to investment institutions, all eyes are turning to AI. Whether measured by specialized talent, investment capital, startup formation, or other dimensions — AI will continue to unleash a revolution of ever-expanding depth and breadth. For the industry's development, whether for institutions or enterprises, the potential is immeasurable. We will certainly see more new demands, more new applications unearthed, increasingly efficient solutions, and more quality enterprises collectively embracing this hundred-billion-level emerging market.

Today, with leading technology, rich product portfolio, and more abundant cash flow, Deepwise clearly has more options. Under this new inflection point, this leading enterprise in the digital-intelligent healthcare赛道 has once again entered the fast lane, poised to lead the new transformation of medical AI.

Source: VBData

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ID: daltonventure

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