Source Code Capital portfolio company WeiMai announced the completion of a new $100 million series funding round, with existing shareholder Source Code Capital continuing to increase its stake.

源码资本·June 20, 2019·0·2

A pioneer and leader in "Internet + Healthcare" service platforms. Its services cover more than 150 million people, with 100,000 doctors on the platform offering a wide range of healthcare service SKUs.

WeiMai, a pioneer and leader among China's third-generation "internet + healthcare" service platforms, recently announced a new series of funding totaling $100 million. The round was led by IDG Capital, with follow-on investments from existing shareholders including Source Code Capital, Matrix Partners China, Qianji Capital, and Yuanjing Capital.

Founded in 2015, WeiMai has focused exclusively on internet healthcare, leveraging new technologies and service models to fulfill its mission of "making healthcare services more accessible" and building China's largest localized one-stop healthcare service platform. Through its steady, methodical service model and strong operational capabilities, the company has quickly established itself as a gateway to healthcare services in major third- and fourth-tier cities across China, offering users a comprehensive suite of internet-based services including appointment scheduling, lab report access, full-cycle payments, online physician consultations, medical record and health档案 management, prescription fulfillment and drug delivery, maternal and chronic disease management, tiered diagnosis and treatment, remote consultations, and family doctor services.

In just over three years, WeiMai has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from leading investors including Source Code Capital, IDG, Matrix Partners China, Qianji Capital, and Yuanjing Capital, maintaining its position at the forefront of the new generation of "internet + healthcare" services.

Regarding the use of proceeds, Jialin Qiu stated: "The funding will focus on three priorities: first, continuing to expand our advantage in localized medical resources, accelerating city coverage, and extending our partnerships to more cities and hospitals; second, driving continuous innovation in service upgrades and technology iteration, with a focus on achieving breakthroughs in 'innovative healthcare service operations' to close the loop on healthcare service delivery; and third, continuing to build and cultivate a more professional and efficient talent pipeline and refine our business segments."

Jialin Qiu, Founder & CEO of WeiMai

Supporting Healthcare Reform, Embracing Hospitals

Healthcare reform is a major public welfare initiative, and "internet + healthcare" has become a national strategic priority. Regulations for internet hospitals have clarified, and local governments are beginning to embrace them. A dense cluster of supporting national policies has been issued, explicitly encouraging medical institutions to use internet and other information technologies to expand the scope and content of healthcare services, and to build integrated online-offline medical service models covering pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, and post-diagnosis.

Since its founding, WeiMai has actively responded to national encouragement and calls for "internet + healthcare" innovation, positioning itself as a "localized trust-based doctor-patient service platform" and using its platform to cultivate new forms of localized trust-based doctor-patient relationships. It builds city-based, one-stop healthcare service platforms.

On the construction of "city-level healthcare service platforms," WeiMai founder Jialin Qiu explained that unlike traditional internet healthcare, which pulls doctors from offline to online services, WeiMai is led by hospitals, with the enterprise building and deeply operating the platform. WeiMai's approach is to collaborate with government or partner with local medical consortiums, hospital groups, and major public hospitals to provide innovative healthcare services. "We fully embrace public hospitals, partner deeply with them, and empower them — we are not here to disrupt them."

"The trajectory of any enterprise's development, now and in the future, must align with the direction and logic of healthcare reform." Qiu elaborated further: the logic of tiered diagnosis and treatment, and the goal of reform, is to "strengthen grassroots care, ensure basic coverage" — this is the government's bottom line for reform. While respecting this bottom line, WeiMai uses new technologies and models in practice to innovate and improve healthcare services, meeting public demand for richer and more diverse services beyond basic healthcare needs.

Optimizing Existing Capacity, Expanding New Capacity

When issuing its Opinions on Promoting the Development of "Internet + Healthcare", the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China emphasized "combining 'optimizing existing capacity' with 'expanding new capacity,' proposing both the use of 'internet +' to improve existing medical services and the enrichment of service supply." WeiMai has accelerated its development around these two priorities, building strong industry reputation and user foundation.

Optimizing existing capacity, improving "healthcare + internet": Using the internet to help hospitals improve efficiency in their existing service processes and better serve users. WeiMai connects all localized medical resources (hospital services, physician services, institutional services, etc.) on its platform, providing access to all local hospital services, data queries, and integrated payment services. By partnering with public hospitals and pharmaceutical suppliers, it develops internet hospitals, enabling networked outpatient models that connect online and offline, expanding the service boundaries of hospitals and doctors, and allowing the public to enjoy the benefits of "internet +" healthcare from home.
Expanding new capacity, developing "internet + healthcare": This focuses more on using the internet to innovate medical services and meet public demand for value-added services beyond basic healthcare. WeiMai has made breakthroughs in "innovative healthcare service operations," using the internet to expand service content and enrich service supply, vigorously developing market-driven medical services. Through market mechanisms, it opens access to more mid-to-high-end, personalized medical services, giving users who need them choices and channels to purchase premium healthcare. The goal is to "ensure every patient receives at least one exclusive service."

Trust-Based Healthcare, Advancing into 100 Cities

The core of healthcare service operations is trust. When healthcare services are trust-based, patient compliance is naturally high, which facilitates recovery — this is the value of "trust." WeiMai's business logic starts from how to build trust between doctors and patients, constructing "trust-based healthcare." Reportedly, WeiMai was the first in China to advocate for "trust-based healthcare," using the public healthcare system as its core to enhance transparency and mutual trust between doctors and patients.

Medical care is localized for patients, so WeiMai builds healthcare services city by city, rooted in localization. Through deep partnerships with public hospitals, WeiMai digitizes the "3+1" functions of a city's major hospitals (3 representing services, payments, and data; 1 representing doctors) on its platform. A medium-sized public hospital generates tens of thousands of doctor-patient interactions daily, and WeiMai can capture these "trust connections" online, forging each doctor-patient encounter into a small unit of trust. Over time, every doctor builds a base of trusting followers, every patient finds doctors they trust, and family doctors naturally emerge.

Based on the localized nature of medical care, WeiMai links the majority of local medical service resources in individual cities, giving users a complete healthcare service experience. This also means WeiMai's primary service cities are not Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen — it pursues a "rural areas surrounding the cities" market strategy. Currently, WeiMai focuses on third- and fourth-tier cities, with more than 150 such cities nationwide covering a population of 500 million.

Once embedded at the core of city-level healthcare services, this "trust relationship" begins to empower WeiMai in return, and medical innovation services advance naturally. As early as 2017, WeiMai partnered with multiple hospitals to develop specialty operations and innovation around specific diseases. Currently, it provides over 12,000 SKUs of services across 32 departments and 1,000+细分病种, offering patients full-process, full-cycle, full-disease management services spanning pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, and post-diagnosis.

With expanding scale and continuous business upgrades, WeiMai now covers 17 provinces, with partnerships in over 70 cities, nearly 1,000 hospitals, more than 10 million users, services covering over 150 million people, and 100,000 doctors providing various healthcare service SKUs on the platform.

Jianbin Zhang, partner at IDG Capital and lead investor in this round, stated: "The operational barriers for city-level operations are actually very high, but WeiMai's unconventional access model has reserved enormous market space for itself. WeiMai focuses on operational investment, and in many cities has achieved the basic user recognition of 'shop on Taobao, see a doctor on WeiMai.' At the same time, its complete embrace of public hospitals and role as a hospital partner aligns with our philosophy — medical services should return to hospitals and the doctors within them; this is the true 'internet + healthcare.'"

Source Code Capital invested in WeiMai's angel round, Series A, and Series B, and continued to increase its stake in this round. As a company director, Yiwen Hao of Source Code Capital stated: "We are pleased to see that over four years, WeiMai has consistently developed on the right track, maintaining its original focus on serving patients and supporting healthcare reform, with its commercial space gradually expanding. Source Code is willing to continue supporting the company's growth, and looks forward to WeiMai achieving more results in the steadily evolving track of internet + healthcare."

Xiaoyin Shen of Qianji Capital, one of the follow-on investors in this round, told VBData: "Qianji has long been committed to investing and building in the care of patients space, and WeiMai has always started from patients' localized medical service needs, building trust-based doctor-patient connections through initial consultations to give patients access to more care-related services. We firmly believe WeiMai will become an important part of improving the overall service level of the existing healthcare system, and gradually become the first choice for local medical services in people's minds."