Chinese healthtech startup SPH Healthcare Commerce, which offers an online-plus-offline drug supply chain, has secured 500 million yuan ($68.4 million) in a Series C round of financing, the startup announced on Friday.
The Series C round was led by two investors, including a 5-billion-yuan ($684.3 million) fund managed by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Reform Holdings Corporation. Another co-investor was ICBC Financial Asset Investment, affiliated with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), a state-owned commercial bank.
Existing investor Shanghai Healthcare Capital, a life science-focused investment firm, re-upped in the deal.
SPH Healthcare Commerce is the latest Chinese healthtech startup to raise fresh capital despite continued volatility in global capital markets. Healthcare and biotech remain attractive to private market investors in China, as the industries booked a total of 752 deals raising over 43.5 billion yuan (almost $6 billion) in the first half of 2023, according to data from market researcher Zero2IPO.
They came only after semiconductors & electronic devices, as dealmaking in China’s homegrown chips is heating up in the face of the US ban on chip exports to China.
This new financing came over two years after the firm had closed 1.033 billion yuan ($141.4 million) in its Series B round co-led by Shanghai Healthcare Capital and China’s JIC Investment. New Alliance Capital and Sinocare, a Chinese publicly-traded manufacturer of blood glucose monitoring systems, were among the investors in the previous round.
Founded in 2015, SPH Healthcare Commerce was incubated by Shanghai Pharmaceuticals, one of China’s largest pharmaceutical groups, to combine the firm’s offline pharmaceutical retail infrastructures with online digital solutions to offer an integrated drug supply chain.
The startup operates an online pharmacy that supplies prescription medicines, including novel drugs, to patients and medical institutions. Its offerings also include digital solutions for pharmaceutical companies, as well as online payment and healthcare management products for patients. By far, the startup has worked with over 300 novel drugmakers and serviced more than six million patients.
SPH Healthcare Commerce was built on a big-cheque investment of 1.112 billion yuan ($152.2 million) in the year of its inception. As its Series A round, the investment saw SPH Healthcare Commerce rope in strategic investors including IDG Capital and e-commerce giant JD.com.
Liu Bin, CEO and president of SPH Healthcare Commerce, said that the startup will look to integrate its internal resources with external opportunities through potential acquisitions of novel drugs at all development phases. “China’s novel drug industry is moving to focus on product commercialisation. A viable business model and a scalable application plan have become some of the most powerful driving forces in the development of novel drugs in the country,” said Lin.