Year: 2020

After a year where the movie business was defined almost entirely by pauses and delays, Warner Bros. took decisive action on December 3.

It had only been a couple of weeks since the studio had announced that in the face of surging coronavirus numbers, it wouldn’t be delaying the Christmas release of “Wonder Woman 1984” yet again. Instead, it would launch the movie simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, the new streaming service from its parent company WarnerMedia.

It turned out that this decision — already described as a transformative moment in the industry, and potentially the beginning of the end for theaters — was just the beginning. On December 3, Warner Bros. announced that it would be following the exact same strategy for every movie on its theatrical slate in 2021.

This may have seemed like welcome news to moviegoers eager to finally see “In the Heights” (already delayed by about a year thanks to the pandemic) or “Dune” (ditto). But while “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot seemed to embrace the news, declaring that it was time to share their movie with fans, other Warner Bros. filmmakers were less enthusiastic.

For example, “The Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan complained that Warner Bros. executives “don’t even understand what they’re losing,” and he claimed that filmmakers had gone to bed “thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” (Nolan’s “Tenet” was released in theaters in the fall, and its disappointing box office numbers, particularly in the U.S., probably played a big role in Warner’s decision.)

And in a guest column for Variety, “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve pointed his finger at AT&T, which acquired Time Warner several years earlier. He suggested that the streaming strategy had less to do with the pandemic and more with the underwhelming launch of HBO Max over the summer.

“With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention,” Villeneuve wrote.

Barely more than a week after the Warner Bros. announcement, Disney had a big presentation of its own, laying out ambitious streaming plans for the next few years, with 10 Marvel shows, 10 Star Wars shows, 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar series and 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar feature films all in the pipeline for Disney+.

Disney’s announcements weren’t greeted with the same uproar and controversy as Warner’s — it didn’t represent a wholesale shift in its theatrical strategy (the Marvel Studios film “Black Widow” is currently still scheduled for a traditional release in May, for example), and unlike WarnerMedia, its announcements didn’t blindside filmmakers and throw their compensation into question.

Still, the message to the industry and the public was quite similar: While Disney isn’t abandoning theaters outright, it clearly sees streaming as its future, with the studio willing to reboot any and every intellectual property (“Turner and Hooch”! “Swiss Family Robinson”! An “Alien” TV series!) to attract potential subscribers.

After a year where the movie business was defined almost entirely by pauses and delays, Warner Bros. took decisive action on December 3.

It had only been a couple of weeks since the studio had announced that in the face of surging coronavirus numbers, it wouldn’t be delaying the Christmas release of “Wonder Woman 1984” yet again. Instead, it would launch the movie simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, the new streaming service from its parent company WarnerMedia.

It turned out that this decision — already described as a transformative moment in the industry, and potentially the beginning of the end for theaters — was just the beginning. On December 3, Warner Bros. announced that it would be following the exact same strategy for every movie on its theatrical slate in 2021.

This may have seemed like welcome news to moviegoers eager to finally see “In the Heights” (already delayed by about a year thanks to the pandemic) or “Dune” (ditto). But while “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot seemed to embrace the news, declaring that it was time to share their movie with fans, other Warner Bros. filmmakers were less enthusiastic.

For example, “The Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan complained that Warner Bros. executives “don’t even understand what they’re losing,” and he claimed that filmmakers had gone to bed “thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” (Nolan’s “Tenet” was released in theaters in the fall, and its disappointing box office numbers, particularly in the U.S., probably played a big role in Warner’s decision.)

And in a guest column for Variety, “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve pointed his finger at AT&T, which acquired Time Warner several years earlier. He suggested that the streaming strategy had less to do with the pandemic and more with the underwhelming launch of HBO Max over the summer.

“With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention,” Villeneuve wrote.

Barely more than a week after the Warner Bros. announcement, Disney had a big presentation of its own, laying out ambitious streaming plans for the next few years, with 10 Marvel shows, 10 Star Wars shows, 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar series and 15 Disney Animation/Disney live action/Pixar feature films all in the pipeline for Disney+.

Disney’s announcements weren’t greeted with the same uproar and controversy as Warner’s — it didn’t represent a wholesale shift in its theatrical strategy (the Marvel Studios film “Black Widow” is currently still scheduled for a traditional release in May, for example), and unlike WarnerMedia, its announcements didn’t blindside filmmakers and throw their compensation into question.

Still, the message to the industry and the public was quite similar: While Disney isn’t abandoning theaters outright, it clearly sees streaming as its future, with the studio willing to reboot any and every intellectual property (“Turner and Hooch”! “Swiss Family Robinson”! An “Alien” TV series!) to attract potential subscribers.

Earlier this month, when Nutanix announced it was hiring former VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami as CEO, it looked like a good match. What’s more, it pulled a key player from a market rival. Well, it seems VMware took exception to losing the executive, and filed a lawsuit against him yesterday for breach of contract.

The company is claiming that Ramaswami had inside knowledge of the key plans of his former company and that he should have told them that he was interviewing for a job at a rival organization.

“Rajiv Ramaswami failed to honor his fiduciary and contractual obligations to VMware. For at least two months before resigning from the company, at the same time he was working with senior leadership to shape VMware’s key strategic vision and direction, Mr. Ramaswami also was secretly meeting with at least the CEO, CFO, and apparently the entire Board of Directors of Nutanix, Inc. to become Nutanix’s Chief Executive Officer. He joined Nutanix as its CEO only two days after leaving VMware,” the company wrote in a statement.

As you can imagine, Nutanix didn’t agree, countering in a statement of its own that, “VMware’s lawsuit seeks to make interviewing for a new job wrongful. We view VMware’s misguided action as a response to losing a deeply valued and respected member of its leadership team. Mr. Ramaswami and Nutanix have gone above and beyond to be proactive and cooperative with VMware throughout the transition.”

At the time of the hiring, analyst Holger Mueller from Constellation Research noted that the two companies were primary competitors and hiring Ramawami was was a big win for Nutanix. “So hiring Ramaswami brings both an expert for multi-cloud to the Nutanix helm, as well as weakening a key competitor from a talent perspective,” he told me earlier this month.

It’s unclear what the end game would be in this type of legal action, but it does complicate matters for Nutanix as it transitions to a new chief executive. Ramaswami took over from co-founder Dheeraj Pandey, who announced plans to leave the post last summer.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara.

Despite the pandemic keeping us in one place most of the time, proptech is still taking off. And not just in the U.S.

Dongnae is looking to digitize the rental and home buying market in South Korea. The startup is announcing the close of a $4.1 million seed round, led by Flybridge and MetaProp, with participation by Goodwater Capital, Maple VC, and a variety of strategic angel investors in both Korea and the U.S. This brings Dongnae’s total funding to $4.8 million.

The company was founded by Matthew Shampine, who was born in Korea but raised in New Jersey. Running WeWork Labs, Shampine was stationed in Asia and then more specifically Korea to build out that arm of the massive coworking firm. Moving a lot, Shampine realized the massive hole in the very fragmented real estate market in Korea.

Dongnae is very similar to Redfin in the U.S., giving buyers and renters a centralized place to find their new home. For now, the startup only represents the buyer/renter side, partnering with the thousands of brokers in Korea to essentially build out the country’s first true MLS (multiple listing system).

Some important context: the real estate market in Korea is very different than here in the states. First, most buildings have their own broker with retail space on the ground floor, meaning that there are thousands of brokers in Korea who only represent a limited number of properties. In fact, Shampine says there are about the same number of brokers in Korea as in the U.S., which has has a much bigger population.

Secondly, due to the fragmentation across brokers, there is no real MLS in Korea that unifies all available properties. Renters and buyers must work across dozens of brokers and usually have to go see the space in person, rather than browse photos online. This system also means that the brokers are often representing both the buyer/renter and seller, which means they aren’t always negotiating in the best interest of the buyer.

Dongnae partners with brokers to centralize all the listings into one place, and gives buyers and renters an interface to browse those homes. In fact, Dongnae offers a Tinder-like experience for buyers, letting them swipe left and right on homes to learn more and more about what they’re looking for and ultimately serve up the best fit.

Not unlike Airbnb, Dongnae goes from complex to complex and builds out the digital inventory for each listing, taking 4K photos and watermarking them and passing them back to the broker, while also listing them on Dongnae.

“It’s not necessarily a franchise but it’s a really close partnership,” said Shampine.

Dongnae makes money by taking a buyer side fee, just like any other broker, which is around 8 percent in Korea. The team is 25 people strong and gender diversity at Dongnae is about 50/50.

Despite the pandemic keeping us in one place most of the time, proptech is still taking off. And not just in the U.S.

Dongnae is looking to digitize the rental and home buying market in South Korea. The startup is announcing the close of a $4.1 million seed round, led by Flybridge and MetaProp, with participation by Goodwater Capital, Maple VC, and a variety of strategic angel investors in both Korea and the U.S. This brings Dongnae’s total funding to $4.8 million.

The company was founded by Matthew Shampine, who was born in Korea but raised in New Jersey. Running WeWork Labs, Shampine was stationed in Asia and then more specifically Korea to build out that arm of the massive coworking firm. Moving a lot, Shampine realized the massive hole in the very fragmented real estate market in Korea.

Dongnae is very similar to Redfin in the U.S., giving buyers and renters a centralized place to find their new home. For now, the startup only represents the buyer/renter side, partnering with the thousands of brokers in Korea to essentially build out the country’s first true MLS (multiple listing system).

Some important context: the real estate market in Korea is very different than here in the states. First, most buildings have their own broker with retail space on the ground floor, meaning that there are thousands of brokers in Korea who only represent a limited number of properties. In fact, Shampine says there are about the same number of brokers in Korea as in the U.S., which has has a much bigger population.

Secondly, due to the fragmentation across brokers, there is no real MLS in Korea that unifies all available properties. Renters and buyers must work across dozens of brokers and usually have to go see the space in person, rather than browse photos online. This system also means that the brokers are often representing both the buyer/renter and seller, which means they aren’t always negotiating in the best interest of the buyer.

Dongnae partners with brokers to centralize all the listings into one place, and gives buyers and renters an interface to browse those homes. In fact, Dongnae offers a Tinder-like experience for buyers, letting them swipe left and right on homes to learn more and more about what they’re looking for and ultimately serve up the best fit.

Not unlike Airbnb, Dongnae goes from complex to complex and builds out the digital inventory for each listing, taking 4K photos and watermarking them and passing them back to the broker, while also listing them on Dongnae.

“It’s not necessarily a franchise but it’s a really close partnership,” said Shampine.

Dongnae makes money by taking a buyer side fee, just like any other broker, which is around 8 percent in Korea. The team is 25 people strong and gender diversity at Dongnae is about 50/50.

Rocket launch startup Skyroot is closing out 2020 with a key milestone in the development program for their Vikram-I launch vehicle: A successful test firing of a solid rocket propulsion stage that serves as a demonstrator of the same tech to be used in the production Vikram. This is the first time that a private Indian company has designed, built and tested a solid rocket propulsion stage in its entirety, and follows a successful engine burn test of an upper stage prototype earlier this year.

Skyroot also created its solid rocket stage using a carbon composite structure whose manufacturing process is entirely automated, the company says. That allows it to realize weight savings of up to five times vs. use of steel, a material typically used to house solid rocket propellant stages. The goal is to use the same process in the production of the final version of Vikram-I, which will help the small launch vehicle realize big benefits in terms of cost, in addition to the reliability benefits that come with the relatively uncomplicated fundamental design of solid rockets, which have no moving parts and therefore less opportunity for failure.

The final third-stage Vikram-1 engine will be 4x the size of this demonstrator, and Skyroot is also in the process of manufacturing four other test solid rocket motors which have a carrying range of thrust, and which will be tested throughout the course of next years as work finishes on their construction.

Skyroot aims to perform its first Vikram-I launch by next December, supported in part by the Indian Space Research Organization. The company has raised $4.3 million to date, and says it’s currently in the process of raising another $15 million round which it’ll aim to close next year. It’s set to become the first private Indian company to build and operate private launch vehicles, with the regulatory framework now in place to allow that to happen since India opened up private launcher operations earlier this year.

Early in the pandemic, it was apparent that there would be worldwide lockdowns of varying degrees. So naturally, there was a run on toilet paper (and to a lesser extent, paper towels and tissues). Stores suddenly found themselves sold out of one of the most basic conveniences consumed by humans.

We had never seen this level of preparation, and the supply chains were not ready. They were still moving at the speed of business-as-usual, creating a gap between supply and demand.

Sliding further into the pandemic, this supply issue for basic goods shifted to the front-line workers who were stretching the safe limits of their personal protective equipment (PPE). This exposed the effect of a sudden change of demand in supply chains. Companies began to repurpose their production to produce protection equipment and hand sanitizer. Some to make a quick profit, others to fill a need in the supply chain.

Governments and corporations were scrambling. There were spreadsheets floating around with offers from potential suppliers.

During this period, it was difficult to get an overview of the entire market, as quality, vendor search and price fluctuations caused general chaos. It was near impossible to track the origin of production, receive any information about any data related to the quality controls of production facilities. The market was flooded with bad products, fakes and so on. Think pieces started to appear with a beginner’s guide to supply chain structure.

Consumers began to understand that the system as it stood was not built for this type of upheaval.

Corporate sourcing strategies have been challenged

We have clearly witnessed that companies have little control of the supply chains. Normally most companies only have a moderately competent risk plan for tier one suppliers. We can only assume that this is why most of us are going without an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 this holiday season. These are not products that are built with components from one source; there are multiple components and materials that go into creating one of these machines.

From the refining process of the outer materials, to the dyeing colors, plastic elements and the need to have low-cost production sites in low-cost countries, all contribute to possible delays in production when things are not moving as they should be. De-constructing a gaming console reveals an extremely complicated matrix of companies, processes, materials and countries.

If we had direct visibility into the journey of each component in a gaming console as a sort of smart-representation exposing all the materials, people involved, companies and locations, we would be able to pinpoint inefficiencies in the supply chain.

All these materials and components find their way in the supply chain, but their stories get lost along the way. That specific data is not available, and thus both companies and countries are struggling to create effective risk plans for world events that throw the supply chain into chaos. Currently, there is a revolution happening under the radar of most people, enabled by distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) to bring such transparency into the supply chains.

Identify your vulnerabilities

Understanding where the risks lie so that companies can protect themselves may require a lot of digging. It entails going far beyond the first and second tiers and mapping full supply chains, including distribution facilities and transportation hubs. This is time-consuming and expensive, which explains why most major firms have focused their attention only on strategic direct suppliers that account for large amounts of their expenditures.

But a surprise disruption that brings a business to a halt can be much more costly than a deep look into a supply chain.

The goal of the mapping process should be to categorize suppliers as low, medium, or high risk and build appropriate mitigation strategies. But this approach is only possible if we can access the data generated by different suppliers at any tier in the supply chain — and we can trust this data for analysis.

The aim is to have early warnings of delays or disruptions, allowing for either the diversification of sources or the stockpiling of key materials or items. Of course, that is all speculative as we have a vaccine rolling out, only months after running out of toilet paper.

Pandemic and the vaccine and supply chains

What we thought was a global and free market was challenged this year. Medical companies experienced a lack of capability to source some core ingredients, such as active ingredients in headache pills produced in India. Everything became a national fight to secure needed goods for one’s own country — a trend also enhanced by the increased nationalism and protectionism in trade. The need for control and visibility into supply chains was apparent and also became a priority for governments and not only the private sector.

With the rollout of a vaccine (or several vaccines), we not only will see the issues presented above in the sense of risk, control of sourcing and process, but quality and responsibility as well. From fakes to already active cyberattacks targeting a very specific point of the supply chain process (vaccines must be shipped and held at a certain temperature) we’re seeing the need for decentralized logistic systems that tell the story of every touch point in production. But none of this will matter if governments cannot manage their own supply chain needs, as we’re already seeing.

It is possible that lessons will be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. It is time for companies and entire industries to rethink and transform their global supply chain models — in close collaboration with governments. One thing is for sure, the pandemic has already exposed the vulnerabilities of many organizations, especially those who have a solid dependence on global sourcing for raw or finished materials.

The good news is that new supply chain technologies are emerging that will heighten visibility across supply chains, reducing risk and creating an infrastructure that can handle the volatility of the next pandemic. The application of distributed ledger technology has already proven to be useful as a solution to ensure accountability and trust in the data provided along the supply chain. Digital supply networks will slowly replace linear supply chain models, breaking down functional silos to create end-to-end visibility, collaboration, agility and optimization.

That is good news for the future, especially since we’re all experts in supply chain logistics after nearly a year of working from home, stockpiling toilet paper and clicking refresh to hopefully add one of the not-nearly-enough gaming consoles to our cart.

Rendin, an Estonian proptech startup that wants to improve the home rental experience, including offering a no-deposit feature, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Tera Ventures, Iron Wolf Capital, Truesight Ventures, Atomico’s Angel Programme, and Startup Wise Guys.

Launched in Estonia in March this year and currently expanding to Poland, Rendin operates a long-term rental platform that promises to smooth out the process between landlords and tenants. Its headline feature is an insurance-backed solution that means no deposit is required from tenants.

The broader premise is that by digitising the rental process and adding an insurance layer, further trust can be generated between parties, therefore increasing occupancy rates.

For landlords, Rendin has created a “letting agreement service” with certain guarantees and has insured those risks via a partnership with ERGO Insurance SE (Munich Re Group). So, for example, if a tenant causes damage or ends up in debt, the property owner is covered. The letting agreement is handled via the startup’s app and platform that plugs into rental marketplaces and real estate CRMs on the backend to provide a fully digital experience.

“We launched publicly in Estonia on March 10th, 2020, two days before the country went into pandemic lockdown,” Rendin co-founder Alain Aun tells me. “It really looked like the world was going to fall apart and a lot of the risks in home renting skyrocketed. We had to reinvent some parts of our product insurance very quickly to adjust to the changes around us.

“Suddenly we had desperate tenants losing their income, expats leaving the country in a hurry, and more. Our learning curve was tremendous. We figured, if we can survive this, we can survive anything. The last eleven months have been constant proof to us that the concept of Rendin can endure”.

Longer term, Rendin is building what Aun describes as “a new standard in home renting”. The first step is to manage the rental process risks to help establish trust between landlords and tenants. This has seen the proptech startup build an “end-to-end value chain,” from contracting, evidence-based handover, preventive insurance flows, loss control, and claim handling.

Aun says Rendin’s insurance product offers landlords more safety than regular deposits, while some risks for tenants are also covered. “The insurance is a tool that helps Rendin to solve real-life, often complicated situations in renting, both for landlords and tenants,” he explains. “Tenants in the Rendin platform don’t have to pay the security deposit, but this is just a feature, not the core product. Trust is the name of the game”.

To generate revenue and cover the insurance costs, Rendin charges a fee of 2.5 percent of the monthly rent. It can be paid by the tenant or by the landlord. “More and more landlords choose to pay the Rendin fee themselves as it helps find new tenants faster,” adds Aun.

On the competition, Rendin isn’t competing with real estate listing sites or letting agencies, and instead can be thought of more as a plugin that can be easily integrated into listing sites and agents’ business processes.

“There are a few no-deposit startups around but their business models, although similar at first glance, are entirely different from ours,” claims the Rendin co-founder. “Most of them are set up to be essentially lending businesses that collect interest from tenants with real estate agencies serving up demand for them, but they don’t really do anything to help mitigate risks for the parties [involved]”.

Applications based on artificial intelligence — whether they are systems running autonomous services, platforms being used in drug development or to predict the spread of a virus, traffic management for 5G networks, or something else altogether — require an unprecedented amount of computing power to run. And today, one of the big names in the world of designing and building processors fit for the task has closed a major round of funding as it takes its business to the next level.

Graphcore, the Bristol, UK-based AI chipmaker, has raised $222 million, a Series E that CEO and co-founder Nigel Toon said in an interview will be used for a couple of key purposes.

First, Graphcore will use the money to continue expanding its technology, based around an architecture it calls “IPU” (Intelligence Processing Unit), which competes against chips from the likes of Nvidia and Intel also optimized for AI applications. And second, Graphcore will use the funding to shore up its finances ahead of a possible public listing.

The funding, Toon said, gives Graphcore $440 million in cash on the balance sheet and a post-money, $2.77 billion valuation to start 2021.

“We’re in a strong position to double down and grow fast and take advantage of the opportunity in front of us,” he added. He said it could be “premature” to describe this Series E as a “pre-IPO” round, “we have enough cash and this puts us in a position to take that next step,” he added. The company has in recent weeks been rumored to be eyeing up a listing not in the UK but on Nasdaq in the US.

This latest round of funding is coming from a roster of financial investors. Led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, it also includes participation from Fidelity International and Schroders, as well as previous investors Baillie Gifford and Draper Esprit. Graphcore has now raised some $710 million to date.

This Series E gives Graphcore a definite step up in its valuation — the company last raised money back in February of this year, a $150 million extension to its Series D that valued the company at $1.95 billion — but all the same, it closes off what Toon described as a “challenging” year for the company (and indeed, the world at large). 

“I view this year as a speed bump,” he said. “It has been challenging and we’ve realigned to speed things up.”

As it has been for many companies, the year came in different parts.

On one side, Graphcore’s hardware and software product development continued apace with ever-faster processors in ever-smaller packages. In July, Graphcore launched the second generation of its flagship chip, the GC200, and a new IPU Machine that runs on it, the M2000, which the company described at the time as the first AI computer to achieve a petaflop of processing power “in the size of a pizza box.”

But on the other side, the building and launch of those products was largely done with a remote workforce, with employees sent to work from home to help slow down the spread of the coronavirus that has gripped the world and rewritten how much of it operates.

Indeed, the industry at large, and how companies are spending and investing during a period of uncertainty, has also likely shifted. Some companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are all getting more serious about their own chipmaking efforts. Others are caught up in a wave of consolidation: witness Nvidia’s efforts to acquire ARM in a $40 billion deal.

All of these spell challenges for an upstart like Graphcore. Toon said Graphcore doesn’t have any plans to make acquisitions: its strategy is based around organic growth.

And, no great surprises here, he is not excited about Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM: “If we’re not careful, things will consolidate too much and that could kill off innovation,” he said. “We have made our position clear to the UK government. We don’t think the Nvidia ARM deal is a good thing.” (Somewhat ironic, considering he and Graphcore co-founder Simon Knowles sold a previous startup to none other than Nvidia.)

He also declined to talk about new customers for Graphcore, but he said that there has been interest from financial services companies, and some from the world of healthcare, automotive and internet companies, “large hyperscalers” in his words, that require the kind of technology that Graphcore is building either to run their systems, or to complement processors that they are potentially also building themselves. (Strategic backers of the company include the likes of Microsoft, BMW, Bosch and Dell.)

Graphcore said that the company is shipping its newest products “in production volume” to customers, and Toon said that a couple of big names are likely to be announced in the coming year.

And it’s that pull of technology, and specifically the processing demands of the next generation of computing, that investors believe will continue to drive business to Graphcore as the dust settles on this year.

“The market for purpose-built AI processors is expected to be significant in the coming years because of computing megatrends like cloud technology and 5G and increased AI adoption, and we believe Graphcore is poised to be a leader in this space,” said Olivia Steedman, senior managing director, Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP) at Ontario Teachers’. “TIP focuses on investing in tech-enabled businesses like Graphcore that are at the forefront of innovation in their sector. We are excited to partner with Nigel and the strong management team to support the company’s continued growth and product development.”

DXY, a 20-year-old online healthcare community for Chinese consumers and healthcare organizations like Pfizer, announced this week that it has raised $500 million in a new round led by private equity firm Trustbridge Partners.

Existing backer Tencent and Hillhouse Capital also participated in the round, which lifted the firm’s total funding to over $660 million to date. DXY’s earlier investors include Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, Legend Capital and DCM.

The company started out as a knowledge-sharing platform for doctors and has over time added a consumer-facing aspect by bringing wellness advice and medical consultation services to the public, that is, steps that patients can take at home before having to go to the hospital.

As the pandemic took hold, hospitals and people around the world rushed to shift their activities online, spurring demand for healthcare apps. DXY responded swiftly and was among the first in China to introduce a real-time COVID-19 tracker at the beginning of the outbreak.

Today, healthcare organizations can also use DXY as an advertising channel, a learning platform as well as a recruiting site, ways for the company to generate revenue.

Since its inception, the site has attracted some 130 million consumers, more than 9,000 medical institutions, and 50,000 doctors who have provided online consultation. The platform has a current user base of 20 million and counts Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca among its major clients.

DXY plans to spend its new proceeds on strengthening the two pillars of its business — support for physicians and services for consumers. Its consumer business faces some strong opponents in China, ranging from SoftBank-backed Ping An Good Doctor, Alibaba Health, JD Health, and WeDoctor, which is also backed by Tencent.