High-speed unicorn: Chinese biotech startup valued at $1b just months after being founded

Aren’t unicorns supposed to be rare? Apparently China didn’t get that memo, because the Middle Kingdom has yet another tech unicorn on its hands after biotech startup Icarbonx announced a series A round on Monday that values it at US$1 billion. The round, which was led by Tencent and also included participation from previous investor Vcanbio, was worth US$154 million.

Icarbonx was founded in late October of 2015, meaning that it took the company less than six months to reach a US$1 billion valuation. That doesn’t make it the fastest unicorn ever – American ecommerce company Jet.com made it to a US$1 billion valuation in just four months – but it’s damn close.

I want to digitalize everyone’s life data, and then decipher that data for the valuable lessons.

The startup’s meteoric rise is, as these things often are, due in part to a good idea and in part to good fortune. The company was founded by Wang Jun, who had previously been CEO of the Beijing Genomics Institute, the biggest gene-sequencing company in the world. He started Icarbonx with the idea of using artificial intelligence and big data to create health management solutions and find medical breakthroughs, using a team that was a mix of biotech and AI/big data experts.

Back in October, artificial intelligence wasn’t a particularly hot topic in China’s tech scene. But recently, thanks in part to high-profile news events like the Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo matches, everybody’s talking about AI, and big companies like Baidu and Alibaba are getting in on the action.

Now, through its investment in Icarbonx, Tencent is in on the action, too.

Icarbonx is a very fast unicorn.

Icarbonx provides what founder Wang Jun believes is one-stop shopping. It operates a data collection and creation platform to mine data from every aspect and stage of human life (including but definitely not limited to genetic data), and then an AI-based analysis platform to turn that data into something meaningful. It has some smart hardware to collect additional data, digital and medical sample storage to maintain its access to data, and even an O2O platform to offer users access to services based on what its AI suggests they might need.

The big-picture purpose of Icarbonx, though, is to mine and analyze tons of health-related data (from consenting users of course) in the hopes of finding breakthroughs via patterns in the data. To that end, it also allows companies and organizations access to its data and analysis, and says it has already partnered with a variety of organizations across the globe from hospitals to drug manufacturers.

“I want to digitalize everyone’s life data, and then decipher that data for the valuable lessons, thus improving everyone’s quality of life,” Wang Jun told Chinese tech news site Netease Tech.