Shanmu SHANMU raises nearly 100M yuan to build AI-native health hardware
What's the deal? Shanmu SHANMU, an AI-native health hardware company founded in London in 2021, has closed a nearly 100 million yuan (~$14M) Series A round. Shixi Capital, a strategic investment fund under GigaDevice Semiconductor, led the round, with co-investors including AfterShokz, Bojiang Capital, Yonghua Investment, and Shanghai Angel Club. Existing shareholders — including the Zhixing No. 1 Fund under Professor Gan Jie and Wanweiwei Capital — also increased their stakes.
The company had previously raised from Professor Gao Bingqiang, Songhe Capital, Qifu Capital, Haofang Venture Capital, and the ICANX Fund under Peking University's Professor Zhang Haixia.
Funds will go toward launching direct-to-consumer medical products, implementing B2B modules, and securing domestic and international medical registration certificates.
Why now? Home health detection has existed for decades — blood glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, and uric acid meters are household staples. But these devices still operate in a "user-initiated, single-point collection" mode inherited from hospitals. The result: low long-term compliance and instruments that become idle clutter.
Wearable devices like smartwatches and rings have scaled heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring, but they hit a physical wall. Photoplethysmography can only sense blood flow beneath the skin — it can't reach molecular, cellular, or protein-level biomarkers. Clinical gold standards for conditions like chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and hyperuricemia require data from tissue fluid, not surface-level readings.
Shanmu SHANMU targets that gap. It has independently developed what it calls the world's smallest ultra-high-precision fully automated biochemical analyser, designed to continuously extract biological indicators from urine, saliva, and sweat. The idea is to digitise the human body at a medical grade — passively and daily — so AI can drive a closed loop from monitoring to intervention.
What could go wrong? Medical device certification across multiple jurisdictions is notoriously slow and expensive. The company must prove clinical accuracy on par with hospital-grade equipment while keeping the consumer experience frictionless. Consumer health hardware is also littered with companies that nailed the tech but failed on adoption — if daily use still feels burdensome, compliance problems will persist.
The signal: This round reflects a broader convergence of AI, biosensing, and consumer health. Investors are betting that the next leap in personal health won't come from another wristband but from devices that access deeper biological data. Shanmu SHANMU's approach — embedding medical-grade sampling into everyday routines — sits at the intersection of medtech and consumer electronics, a space attracting growing capital as preventive health moves from hospitals to homes.
Read more: eu.36kr.com
