iCarbonX Joins Series B Round In US Doctor-Patient Data Firm HealthLoop
Jillian Yue
June 26, 2017 — 16:31 HKT
iCarbonX, an artificial intelligence-enabled health data mining start-up in China, has participated in a US$8.4 million series B financing round in U.S. healthcare company HealthLoop, with an eye to integrate the American firm's patient-generated data to its own data mining efforts.
Other investors including NextEquity, Lafayette General Hospital, Canvas Ventures and Summation Health Ventures also participated in the round, which will be used to support HealthLoop's expansion of its market share.
"The investment in HealthLoop is in line with our strategic planning. The big data era of life sciences has just been launched, whereas a lot of previously dismissed healthcare data has just begun to show its significance," said Jun Wang, founder of iCarbonX and previously CEO of Chinese genetic testing company BGI. "The HealthLoop platform has done an excellent job in connecting patients and doctors, tracking patients’ recovery process and mining patients’ data. All of these are essential components of iCarbonX’s digital life ecosystem."
iCarbonX plans to integrate HealthLoop’s patients-generated data to its own data mining technology, in order to build an ecosystem of digital life. In January, the Shenzhen-based company said that it had invested a total of US$400 million in seven companies to form a Digital Life Alliance, acquiring stakes in fives U.S. companies: SomaLogic, HealthTell, PatientsLikeMe, AOBiome, GALT; one Israeli company Imagu Vision and Chinese firm Tianjin Robustnique Corporation Ltd.
HealthLoop was established by Dr. John Shlain in 2009 and helps to digitally connect patients with their doctors and care-givers. It enables automated patient care coordination by providing its users with clinical information and post-hospitalization follow-up care plans.
HealthLoop’s platform is designed to keep track of patients’ illness. It uses analytics engine to provide real-time analysis of all sets of patients-generated data, so as to allow the medical and nursing team to commit their time to those patients and medical issues most in need. In this way, the platform pushes the doctor-patient relation to go beyond the clinic, and facilitates boundary crossing between different groups.
"When patients return from hospitals to the real world, they will be confronted with a whole series of problems that influence their post-hospital recovery in ways that are difficult to predict," explained John Shlain, founder of HealthLoop. "But if we build a relationship with them, we can be there throughout the process to support them. And the further we can take that, the better it will be for patients’ lives and the better the outcome will be."
Established in October 2015, iCarbonX achieved a US$1 billion valuation in a short six-months, after Tencent Holdings led a RMB1 billion (US$155 million) series A funding round in April 2016 in the company, making it the fastest technology unicorn in the world.
https://www.chinamoneynetwork.com/2...und-in-us-doctor-patient-data-firm-healthloop
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Terark, A Chinese Startup, May Have Just Revolutionized How Data Is Stored, Accessed & Analyzed
Gwyn D'Mello June 26, 2017
A Chinese startup may have found the solution to big data's biggest problem. Reducing all that 'big data' into smaller file formats. Sounds eerily similar to Pied Piper from Silicon Valley, right? Only this is real life, and it's actually happening.
Before that, a quick perspective as to why this discovery is so important. According to Intel, by 2020, the average internet user will generate approximately 1.5GB of data per day. Smart cars, meanwhile, will generate 4,000 GB each daily, not to mention connected hospitals, flights, factories and more. In short, tech companies are going to have huge amounts of data to sift through for ads, logistics and resource management services, and artificial intelligence. So how do these companies deal with Big Data?
Technology experts believe we’re approaching a culmination of data influx, coupled with a lack of purging of old data. They foresee cloud storage shortages in the future that could hamper how our smartphones, apps, and computers operate, as well as longer processing times for IoT devices and services. Data compression is not yet effective enough to counter this problem, and even then this technique hinders how AI can access these stores to learn.
Now, a Beijing-based startup called Terark believes it has the solution. Far from Silicon Valley, founder and CTO Lei Peng says they’ve created an algorithm that could tackle the coming data crisis, beating out other competitors in the process.
"Our technology allows us to make big data smaller," Terark VP Remy Tricard told Tech in Asia. Basically, while working on a pet project, Peng managed to develop a highly efficient data compression algorithm. TerarkDB – the company’s database storage engine that uses the algorithm – claims to be able to read data over 230 times faster than the likes of Facebook’s own system RocksDB.
Not only is Terark’s compression ratio better (large amounts of data compressed into smaller archives), it also exhibits lower latency. Most importantly though, is that Terark’s system keeps the data searchable without needing to unpack it, meaning machine learning systems and others can easily access its stores without overloading their own servers.
The best part? Terark is composed of a team of just 10 people, and the startup itself is only about two years old. In that short time, it’s even managed to attract high profile investors like Alibaba, which has signed a $1 million contract with the startup to use its compression system for the Alibaba Cloud. Peng also says Terark is currently negotiating deals with other big names in tech from both China and the US, though he declined to name any.
Code:
https://www.techinasia.com/real-pied-piper-silicon-valley
http://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/terark-a-chinese-startup-may-have-just-revolutionized-how-data-is-stored-accessed-analyzed-324651.html
