Crossover crossover, a recipe for disruptive healthcare innovation?

-- A compendium of Benjamin Capital's investment logic and cross-innovation investment cases

On July 23, 2021, Cytek Biosciences, a Silicon Valley-based provider of cellular analysis instruments and solutions, successfully logged on to NASDAQ (symbol: CTKB). Most people think of healthcare investments as having a long return cycle, but it only took Cytek six years to grow from two founders to a company with annual revenues of more than $100 million and a market capitalization of billions of dollars. Dr. Yu Fang, a founding partner of Bentgrass Capital, is affectionately known as "Cytek Mom" because Bentgrass Capital has invested in Cytek since its inception and has benefited from the company's multiple rounds of capital raises.

Recent buzz has analyzed some of the keywords that have contributed to Cytek's success, including "fast-growing niche business," "industry-changing technology," "textbook technology," "technology-driven innovation," and "a path to success. driven innovation company's path to growth", etc. Notably, Cytek has created a new generation of disruptive products through the clever intersection of IT (Information Technology) and BT (Biological Technology) - applying Optical Communication's full-spectrum technology to flow cytometry, which has changed the traditional analytical method of requiring filters.

The two founders of Cytek are Yan Ming, a veteran of flow cytometry manufacturer BD, and Jiang Wenbin, a veteran of IT communication startups. The crossover of technologies and the organic combination of teams from cross-industry backgrounds seem to have become the recipe for a new generation of disruptive medical innovations.

As one of the world's leading life sciences and healthcare specialty funds, Bentley Capital categorizes its investments into "innovative medicine" and "cross-innovation". In addition to Cytek, we have sorted out a few cases of cross-innovation investments by Bentgrass, such as the device company Wenxin Technology, which launched a wearable multi-indicator cardiac monitor, the company Liantong Technology, which produces medical-grade hearing aids based on artificial intelligence and chip technology, and the platform company Twist Biosciences, which realizes large-scale DNA synthesis on silicon-based chips, etc., which gives a brief glimpse of the logic of Bentgrass's investments.

Cytek's investment logic can be summarized in a few words.

Cytek Biosciences is a leading life science company in flow cytometry. Flow cytometry has long played an important role in research in immunology, oncology, hematology and translational medicine. However, traditional flow technology is limited by the spectral overlap of filters, which makes it difficult to detect and analyze complex cell samples with more than 20 colors.

In order to enhance the number of multicolor signal acquisition channels, Cytek adopts IT/BT (Information Technology and Biotechnology) cross-innovation, and introduces optical signal analysis methods, such as CWDM technology in fiber optic communication and APD chip technology, into the field of flow cytometric analysis, and creates its core product, the Full Spectrum flow cytometer.

Cytek's full-spectrum flow cytometer breaks through the tradition and is capable of detecting and analyzing more than 40 colors in a tube of cell samples, which greatly meets the growing needs of life science research and clinical diagnosis and treatment, and has been widely used in the scenarios of tumor immunity, allergy and autoimmunity, infectious diseases, organ transplants, blood cell disorders, and immune deficiencies, etc., and in the future, it can also be used for the scenarios of antibody-coupled compounds, nano-biology, and so on. biology scenarios.

Cytek's technological innovation is driven by the company's multidisciplinary technical backbone. For example, the company has excellent talent resources in lasers, computer software, flow control technology, image processing, weak signal processing and biological probes. Our CEO, Dr. Wenbin Jiang, is a serial successful entrepreneur in the field of optical communication, and our CTO, Dr. Ming Yan, worked in the instrumentation R&D department of BD, a leading flowmetry company, and has more than 20 years of experience in new device development.

Under the cross-disciplinary collision, Cytek has created a full-spectrum flow cytometer with the advantages of high sensitivity, low cost, stability and ease of use. Cytek has become the best choice for high-end multicolor flow cytometry in the world, with its technology package covering hardware, software, system, reagents, etc. Its product line continues to be enriched and its moat deepened, and Cytek has become a "dark horse" in the industry that has overturned the existing market pattern. Cytek has become a "dark horse" on the industry track, disrupting the existing market landscape. Currently, Materia Capital, which has continuously injected capital into Cytek over the past six years, is its largest institutional investor.

Twist Bioscience (NASDAQ: TWST) is a synthetic biology and genomics company that is pioneering a new way to create synthetic DNA by "writing" DNA in microdroplets on a silicon chip.

Using rigorous engineering principles, Twist has cross-innovated the highly scalable production and processing infrastructure of the semiconductor industry to the biosynthesis of DNA, breaking through traditional technological bottlenecks and enabling the large-scale production of DNA while ensuring the precision and quality of DNA synthesis.

The synthesis platform has high requirements for chip fabrication, microdroplets, control and feedback, and software systems, and its development spans multiple specialized disciplines with the highest technical barriers.

Traditional DNA synthesis methods use 96-well plates, which can only synthesize one gene in the same physical space, limiting the application of large-scale DNA synthesis in terms of throughput, scalability, and cost. In contrast, Twist's DNA synthesis platform can synthesize nearly 10,000 genes on a single chip. The platform reduces the reaction volume for stepwise addition of bases to single-stranded DNA by a factor of 1 million, while increasing throughput by a factor of 1,000. As a result, Twist synthesizes more DNA by using fewer reagents at a dramatically lower cost per gene synthesized.

Founded in 2015, Winkind's first product is a wearable multi-indicator heart monitor, which is dedicated to providing accurate, convenient, and comprehensive home heart health monitoring solutions.

With more than 10 years of experience in signal processing and electronic engineering, Winkind's team introduced advanced miniature sensors and digital signal processing technologies in the field of automotive sensing into the medical field, and developed a lightweight and portable wearable cardiac monitoring device - "Winkind Little One". "Smart Heart Stickers. The band-aid sized product is simple to install, easy to operate, and takes only a few minutes for daily monitoring, making it very easy to use.

"Winking Heart Little One" is the world's first "heart sound + ECG + wearable" joint medical device. With patented high-tech sensors, the first synchronized acquisition of heart sound, ECG signals and comprehensive analysis, accurate and fast, more comprehensive than a single signal information, more and more quickly find problems and grasp the heart condition, such as arrhythmia, heart storage, valves, myocardium, heart failure.

Currently, this product can be used for assisted diagnosis and out-of-hospital long-term monitoring of a variety of heart diseases including heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and congenital heart disease, and the accuracy of the assisted diagnosis has been verified by the cardiac ultrasound data from multiple tertiary hospitals. It is applicable to a wide range of people, such as people with heart disease or hidden heart disease, the elderly, patients with chronic diseases, sub-healthy people, people with high stress, and young and middle-aged office workers who are concerned about their own health. The application scenarios have also been greatly expanded to out-of-hospital, community, and family. In the future, Winkind will expand a series of portable health monitoring devices with cloud-based big data service, which will be applied to people's daily health monitoring.

Founded in 2018, HearingTone Technology is a high-tech company focusing on medical hearing algorithms and products, and is committed to applying the latest artificial intelligence and Internet acoustic audio technology to the healthcare field. The company's core product is a new generation of AI-based medical grade hearing aids.

The HearingTone team includes experts in AI, Internet, chip technology, audiology, acoustics, and speech signal processing. CEO Chris Chen has nearly 20 years of experience in the IT industry, and CTO Mr. Li Yantao, a former MOTO cell phone architect, has more than 20 years of experience in speech processing and AI technology.

Combined with its own R&D experience, the Lietong team creatively introduced cloud computing and chip technology into the field of medical hearing aids, independently developed a new cloud computing hearing aid algorithms, high-performance algorithms and low-power chip organic combination, to create the country's first "headset + cell phone + cloud" three-end linkage of the intelligent hearing aid, achieving zero breakthroughs in the industry. The newest addition to the lineup is a new, more advanced version of the newest hearing aid, which is a breakthrough in the industry.

Users wearing a stylish wireless headset hearing aid can independently perform accurate fitting on their cell phones, and the cloud automatically adapts the sound solution for various indoor and outdoor scenarios, so that they can listen to the world more comfortably and conveniently, clearly and brightly.

In the medical hearing aid research and development at the same time, Lietong Technology will also be the application of algorithms to the mass consumer market, the earliest in the country with independent intellectual property rights of the assisted listening to the headset program, health headset program. The headset can be equipped with assistive listening function to make the conversation clearer, so that everyone can have a healthy and personalized listening experience.

In short, the cross-innovation technologies of Cytek Bioscience, Twist Bioscience, Winking Technology, and Listening Technology have brought users a smarter and more convenient product experience, and the company's interdisciplinary team of talent has built barriers to protect core technology patents. With the advantages of joint innovation in hardware and software, laser electricity, chips, sensors and biomedical technology, these companies have harvested the favor of BenQ Capital.

Benjamin Capital believes that there is an opportunity to create disruptive and innovative products through the crossover of different classmates' technologies. People within the same industry are often limited in their innovative thinking and do not necessarily understand the technological development of other industries. Over the past two decades, there have been many technological breakthroughs and applications in the IT industry, materials, and nanoscience, and some of these mature technologies can be applied to life sciences to create a new generation of medical devices, diagnostics, and life sciences tools that will disrupt the traditional medical industry and better serve human health.