Healthcare and chip companies close new funding rounds; satellite communications, energy storage batteries, and other sectors hit milestones | Rongbao · July

Sustained competitive advantage comes from technological foresight and patience, the courage to tackle scientific challenges, deep understanding of customer and consumer needs, and relentless diligence in expanding markets. In this month's Rongbao, we continue to round up key funding rounds, technology and product milestones, and industry recognition.

Jul

Funding

Mirxes Closes $50 Million Series D Round to Accelerate Cancer Early Screening R&D and Commercialization

On July 27, leading RNA technology company Mirxes announced the completion of its Series D round, raising $50 million total. Investors include Fopu Capital, the Singapore Economic Development Board's dedicated investment fund (EDBI), and affiliates of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). Gaorong Ventures previously participated in Mirxes' Series B round.

Founded in 2014, Mirxes is committed to providing innovative blood-based cancer early screening products and services globally. The company has developed and commercialized precise, non-invasive, and affordable blood miRNA detection assays for early screening of cancer and other diseases.

Its gastric cancer screening product (GASTROClear™) is a blood miRNA-based molecular diagnostic kit that has been approved in Singapore and received CE marking in the European Union. It is currently undergoing a prospective clinical trial approaching 10,000 participants in China. According to industry reports, Mirxes is the first and only company globally to obtain regulatory approval for a molecular gastric cancer screening in vitro diagnostic (IVD) product.

Additionally, Mirxes has launched its flagship CADENCE (Cancer Detected Early caN be CurEd) program, which leverages the company's industry-leading miRNA technology combined with multi-omics biomarker detection to develop a blood-based early screening test covering nine types of cancer.

Going forward, the company will build an industry-leading multi-omics technology company centered on RNA technology, vigorously promote the commercialization of blood-based cancer early screening products in the Asia-Pacific market, and establish Southeast Asia's leading genetic testing platform for the full cancer care continuum. Read more

SAINT BELLA Closes Hundreds of Millions of RMB in Series C Strategic Funding to Build a World-Leading Family Care Brand

Recently, SAINT BELLA and its parent company Becom International announced the completion of their C-3 round, with strategic investors including C Capital, Swire Properties' innovation fund, Shenqi Capital, and Mirae Asset. This completes three tranches of Series C strategic funding involving Tencent, China Life, and the current round's investors. Gaorong Ventures invested in the company's Pre-A round in early 2018 and has continued to increase its stake in subsequent rounds.

Founded in 2017, Becom International started with its luxury maternal and infant care brand SAINT BELLA and affordable luxury brand Baby BELLA, and has since expanded into broader consumption service scenarios for China's new-generation families. This includes its at-home care brand "Yujia," women's pregnancy and daily nourishment brand "Guanghetang," postpartum recovery brand "S Treatment Beauty," and a forward-looking entry into elder care services — forming a business model that starts with early postpartum care needs, mines customer lifetime value, and extends across the full care services industry chain.

SAINT BELLA and Baby BELLA have opened nearly 50 stores nationwide, ranking first in market share in multiple tier-one cities. In its home base of Hangzhou, the company holds nearly 30% market share. It is also one of the few brands in the industry that can achieve profitability in cross-regional operations under a direct-operated model.

Becom International has built the industry's first proprietary SaaS management system, with standardized, precise, and systematic digital operations capabilities spanning store management to intelligent logistics allocation. Read more

MKSemi Closes Series A Round to Accelerate Low-Power UWB Chip Market Expansion and Mass Production

On July 28, low-power UWB (ultra-wideband) chip design company MKSemi announced the completion of its Series A round, raising approximately RMB 80 million total, led by China Merchants Capital. Gaorong Ventures participated in MKSemi's Pre-A round in 2020 and co-led the Pre-A+ round, and continued to increase its stake in this round.

Founded in June 2019 by a team of senior experts in mixed-signal design, MKSemi focuses on UWB chip and solution development.

MKSemi's first-generation UWB product, the MK8000 chip, integrates ranging and angle measurement, active radar, high-speed data transmission, and networking functions — the most highly integrated UWB solution in the industry. Its ultra-low-power design significantly extends battery life in electronic products, making it possible to add multi-function UWB to wireless sensor products with extremely stringent size requirements.

MKSemi is actively working closely with mobile phone, automotive, and industrial IoT customers to accelerate adoption of its first-generation MK8000 product in relevant fields, while advancing development of its second-generation UWB product. Read more

Jul

By the Numbers

GalaxySpace Successfully Launches China's First Flat-Panel Communications Satellite with Flexible Solar Arrays

At 10:50 AM on July 23, China successfully launched the GalaxySpace Lingxi-03 satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center using a Long March 2D carrier rocket. The satellite entered its designated orbit and the launch mission was a complete success.

The GalaxySpace Lingxi-03 satellite was independently developed by GalaxySpace. It is equipped with a millimeter-wave multi-beam digital payload with tens of gigabits per second capacity, designed to validate next-generation low-orbit broadband satellite communications as well as ultra-large power systems, active thermal control, industrial integrated molding structures, and multi-satellite stack compression and release technologies. This also marks China's first in-orbit validation of multi-satellite stacked launch technology, providing technical support for rapid deployment of China's mega-constellation low-orbit communications network.

This satellite is China's first to use flexible solar arrays. The "flexible wings" feature small stowage volume, light weight, and modularity — easier to pack, with larger surface area at the same mass for greater solar energy absorption, making them suitable for mass stacked satellite launches and significantly accelerating satellite internet construction.

GalaxySpace will accelerate mass production of stackable flat-panel satellites, advance core technologies including phased array antennas for direct-to-cellphone satellite connectivity, on-board high-power systems, and digital processing payloads, and work with upstream and downstream partners to accelerate satellite internet construction.

XVERSE Open-Sources 13-Billion-Parameter General-Purpose Large Model XVERSE-13B: High Performance, Fully Open Source, Free for Commercial Use

On August 7, XVERSE announced the open-sourcing of its 13-billion-parameter high-performance general-purpose large model XVERSE-13B, available for free commercial use.

XVERSE-13B is currently the best-performing multilingual large model at this parameter scale, surpassing representative open-source models including Llama-2-13B and Baichuan-13B across multiple authoritative Chinese and English benchmarks. With advantages including high performance, full open-source availability, and free commercial use, it can significantly reduce deployment costs for universities and enterprises. It not only enables domestic alternatives but also represents a better choice for Chinese-language applications.

Based on a standard Transformer architecture, XVERSE-13B was trained from scratch on 1.4 trillion high-quality, diverse tokens with 13 billion parameters, supporting more than 40 languages with a context window of 8192. XVERSE will soon release a chat-optimized version for out-of-the-box use, continuously improving the developer experience.

XVERSE-13B is a general-purpose foundation model. Services built on it include text generation, automated writing, data analysis, knowledge Q&A, multilingual translation, personalized interaction, character role-play, and professional assistant applications — delivering substantial value to users. XVERSE-13B is expected to have broad application prospects in healthcare, education, culture and tourism, finance, and entertainment, and will also provide strong technical support for XVERSE's own metaverse applications.

Open Source Information

Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/xverse/XVERSE-13B

Github: https://github.com/xverse-ai/XVERSE-13B

Contact: opensource@xverse.cn

Xinhuazhang Releases Next-Generation High-Speed Simulator GalaxSim Turbo, Enabling Agile Verification of 100-Billion-Gate Ultra-Large-Scale Chips

On July 12, leading system-level verification EDA solution provider Xinhuazhang unveiled its next-generation high-speed simulator GalaxSim Turbo at the 2023 Design Automation Conference (DAC), featuring exponential digital simulation acceleration advantages and verification capacity exceeding 100 billion gates.

Based on ultra-large-scale distributed simulation technology, GalaxSim Turbo employs multiple simulation engines to enable multi-core, multi-server parallel computing power. While dramatically improving execution speed, it robustly supports agile verification and development of 100-billion-gate ultra-large-scale chips. This technology is critically important for breaking through traditional logic simulator capacity limits, introducing system-level verification early in chip design, and achieving continuous integration and design (CICD) for chip design and verification — filling the gap between traditional logic simulators and hardware emulators.

In real-world testing on large computing chip designs under identical conditions, a traditional simulator required seven days for typical tests; GalaxSim Turbo using over 400 compute threads reduced simulation time to under two hours, achieving a breakthrough efficiency improvement of nearly 100x compared to traditional simulators.

Jingneng Microelectronics Announces Successful Tape-Out of Two FRD (Fast Recovery Diode) Products

Recently, Jingneng Microelectronics announced the successful tape-out of two FRD products it designed and developed. These follow the successful tape-out of IGBT devices on 750V and 1200V platforms, representing the third and fourth automotive-grade power devices developed by Jingneng.

Fast recovery diodes (FRDs) are semiconductor diodes with excellent switching characteristics and short reverse recovery time. In new energy vehicle electronic control modules, FRDs are used in pairs with IGBTs. Jingneng's new-generation FRDs feature high temperature coefficients, excellent heat dissipation, and outstanding self-current-sharing effects, offering significant advantages in stability and parameter consistency for electric vehicle applications.

Jingneng Microelectronics is a power semiconductor company incubated by Geely, focusing on Si IGBT and SiC MOS development and innovation. Leveraging combined capabilities in "chip design + module manufacturing + automotive qualification," it provides power solutions for new energy vehicles, electric motorcycles, photovoltaics, energy storage, and new energy vessels.

WeView Zinc-Iron Flow Battery Named to National Energy Sector First-of-Its-Kind Major Technical Equipment List

Recently, WeView's researched, developed, and produced "zinc-iron flow new-type energy storage battery" was included in the National Energy Administration's "Third Batch of Energy Sector First-of-Its-Kind Major Technical Equipment (Projects) List." This selection demonstrates the high recognition from authoritative bodies including the National Energy Administration for the zinc-iron flow energy storage technology pathway, reflecting that the energy storage industry's technology and policy direction is advancing toward long-duration, low-cost solutions.

The zinc-iron flow new-type energy storage battery offers advantages including extreme safety, low levelized cost of energy, long-duration storage, high service life, and flexible configuration. It has already been successfully deployed in photovoltaic-plus-storage projects in Shangrao, Jiangxi and Rizhao, Shandong.

WeView is actively strategically deploying research, development, and scaled manufacturing of flow battery energy storage technology, steadily building gigawatt-scale flow battery production bases across Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Fujian, and other provinces, with expected 2023 capacity exceeding 6 GWh.

Cascadia's NASH Drug Candidate CS0159 Completes US Phase I Clinical Trial with Positive Results

Recently, Cascadia and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly developed NASH drug candidate CS0159, which completed its US Phase I clinical trial with positive results.

CS0159 is a novel potent non-steroidal farnesoid X receptor (FXR) small-molecule agonist obtained through crystal structure-assisted design. It has received clinical trial approvals for three indications including non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), primary biliary cholangitis (PBC), and primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC).

During the Phase I clinical trial, CS0159 demonstrated excellent safety and tolerability along with expected PD biomarker signals. The Phase IIa study for the NASH indication is currently proceeding smoothly in the United States, with patient enrollment expected to complete in July 2023. The safety and preliminary efficacy of CS0159 monotherapy in NASH is promising. Meanwhile, Phase II studies for multiple indications have also been successively launched at multiple domestic centers.

As this project advances smoothly, it is expected to bring more innovative therapies to metabolic disease patients in China and globally.

Advance Intelligence Group's Atome Partners with TikTok Shop to Expand Malaysia's E-Commerce Market

Recently, Atome, Southeast Asia's leading consumer finance platform under Advance Intelligence Group, partnered with TikTok Shop (Malaysia). This strategic partnership enables businesses of all sizes in Malaysia, especially SMEs and young entrepreneurs, to leverage the potential of e-commerce for growth.

Atome's "buy now, pay later" service provides consumers with flexible shopping options, with installment payments over three or six months. With Atome becoming one of TikTok Shop Malaysia's payment solutions, consumers can enjoy an enhanced online shopping and payment experience. Leveraging TikTok Shop's innovative social commerce features and Atome's convenient payment solution, merchants can harness the power of e-commerce to expand their reach and drive sales growth.

Atome also recently announced a partnership with Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore. Since April this year, over 100,000 BNPL transactions have been recorded under the Atome-Standard Chartered lender partnership.

Genki Forest Enters Costco, America's Largest Membership Warehouse Club, Gaining Recognition from Mainstream US Retail Channel

In early July, Chi Forest White Peach x Lychee sparkling water combo packs officially launched in Costco, a mainstream US retail channel, starting from California and gradually rolling out to other Costco regions across the United States.

Costco is America's largest chain of membership warehouse clubs and the pioneer of this retail model. It is the world's third-largest retailer, with over 850 stores and 110 million members globally, and maintains an extremely rigorous product selection and evaluation system.

Genki Forest becoming one of the Chinese beverage brands to enter US Costco represents recognition from mainstream US retail channels and consumers of Genki Forest's philosophy and capability in creating healthy, quality products.

Horizons

Geekplus Helps BMW Build World's Advanced Digital-Intelligent Factory: Picking Efficiency Up 400%, Overall Energy Consumption Significantly Reduced

MemVerge Launches Memory Machine™ Cloud, Delivering Ultimate Efficiency for a New Cloud Experience

Recognition

On August 7, the China FOF Research Center released its "2023 Special Rankings," in which Gaorong Ventures was named to 2023 Top 5 VC Funds by Returns, Top 20 Best AI/Enterprise Service Investors, and Top 30 Best Semiconductor/Healthcare Investors.

Gaorong Ventures founding partner Michael Mao was named to 2023 Top 20 Best Semiconductor Investors, and Gaorong Ventures partner Yang Kun was named to 2023 Top 20 Best Healthcare Investors.