Deal Activities
TMT
• InfStones, a blockchain infrastructure provider, has closed a $33 million Series B funding round from a group of investors including Qiming Venture Partners. With the new funding, InfStones plans to triple its team and expand support to more than 100 chains and protocols.
• Qiming portfolio company Akulaku, Southeast Asia’s leading digital banking and finance platform, has received a $100 million strategic investment. This round of funding will allow the company to continue meeting the daily financial needs of underserved customers in emerging markets.
• BUD Technologies, one of the world’s largest 3D user-generated content platforms, has raised fresh capital in a Series A+ round of financing totaling $15 million led by Qiming Venture Partners. The new funds will be used to build up the app’s 3D creation tools to add more functions. This global metaverse-based social platform also plans to tap into VR consoles to expand its adoption from the mobile-only platform.
• Qiming Venture Partners led $6.75 million Pre-Series A financing round in NFTGo.io, a leading NFT data analytics platform. The funding will be used to fuel NFTGo.io’s next phase of growth and development and accelerate global hiring.
Healthcare
• Qiming portfolio company SceneRay announced that it has closed a D+ financing round of RMB 300 million. Over the years, the company has been deeply involved in the field of deep brain stimulation therapy, while leading the frontier exploration of invasive brain-computer interfaces for medical use.
Portfolio Milestones and Recognitions
TMT
• TigerGraph has launched “Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge”, a global search for innovative ways to harness the power of graph technology and machine learning to solve real-world problems. Winners across four main categories will be announced this May at the 2022 Graph + AI Summit, the largest open industry event for graph and AI organized by TigerGraph.
• Dingdong Maicai, a leading fresh food e-commerce platform in China, showed that the sales volume of high-end ready-made meals on the platform increased more than three times year-on-year during the Spring Festival. Three million ready-made meals were sold within the seven-day period with the price per order doubling compared with that of last year.
• Insta360’s professional VR cameras have long been favored by creators, becoming one of the most popular equipment for innovative VR creation. The company has supported the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala by using its state-of-the-art cameras, Titan and Pro2, to record wonderful on-stage moments in VR panorama view. Viewers can freely choose the angle they want to see, by sliding the screen or turning their phones, for a truly immersive experience. This also marks the third time that Insta360 has supported the CCTV Spring Festival Gala for VR content creation.
Healthcare
• Amoy Diagnostics has entered a partnership with the French pharmaceutical group Pierre Fabre Group to develop Companion Diagnostic kits in China, supporting encorafenib and binimetinib marketing authorization applications.
• Shulan Health’s Liver Fat Health Research App has won the Red Dot Design Award for its creativity and high design quality. Jointly developed by Shulan Health and Huawei, Liver Fat Health Research App provides a user-friendly interface that divides into several functional modules and blends graphical representation.
• WeDoctor, a leading medical health technology platform, launched the “WeDoctor Hong Kong Anti-Epidemic Platform”, amassing over 23,000 doctors in Mainland China to provide 24-hour free, uninterrupted online medical consultation services to Hong Kong citizens, in hope to alleviate pressure on the Hong Kong healthcare system.
• ShouTi, a clinical-stage global biopharmaceutical company developing novel oral therapeutics to treat a wide range of chronic diseases, has introduced Basecamp Bio as a wholly owned subsidiary to fuel ShouTi’s pipeline and pursue drug discovery partnerships.
• CanSinoBIO announced that its Recombinant Novel Coronavirus Vaccine Adenovirus Type 5 Vector, Convidecia™, has been approved by the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council of China as a heterologous booster, making it the first adenovirus-vectored vaccine to be included in the heterologous vaccination program in China.
• Insilico Medicine announced its first major milestone in collaboration with Fosun Pharma. Insilico Medicine has used its proprietary AI platform to nominate a preclinical candidate compound for innovative cancer immunotherapy for its QPCTL program. Insilico Medicine and Fosun Pharma are working together on IND-enabling studies to advance PCCs in the QPCTL program to clinical trials.
• Abbisko Therapeutics announced that it would conduct a clinical study on the combination therapy of its investigational pan-FGFR inhibitor ABSK091 and tislelizumab, an anti PD-1 antibody developed by BeiGene for the treatment of urothelial cancer.
• Alamar Biosciences, together with SciNeuro Pharmaceuticals, announced a multi-program collaboration and license agreement to discover and develop novel therapeutic antibodies for targets within the field of neurological diseases, based on Alamar Biosciences’ Attobody platform.
• Pluslife Biotech, an enterprise based in the Greater Bay Area, launched the first handheld Covid-19 Nucleic Acid Test product, Pluslife Mini Dock, to help with pandemic prevention and control. Pluslife Mini Dock can detect a positive sample in about 15 minutes and confirm a negative sample in 35 minutes, significantly reducing the waiting time.
• Antengene announced that ATG-037, the first orally-available, small molecule CD73 inhibitor, has received approval by the Bellberry Human Research Ethics Committee in Australia to initiate the Phase I STAMINA trial. This trial marks a first-in-human study of ATG-037 in patients with locally advanced or metastatic solid tumors.
Qiming Updates
• Nisa Leung, Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, has talked to Health Times, a top-tier media outlet in China, during which she shared her insights and stories behind Qiming’s investments. Addressing the unmet clinical needs has always been an investment focus for Qiming. Return rate is not the only criterion in many of our investments, Nisa highlighted. Qiming is committed to finding great companies for the future and bringing long-term value to the society.
Sources: Qiming Venture Partners, company press releases, media reports, etc.
