Online doctor appointment platform ZocDoc announced on August 21 that it has completed a round of financing of 130 million US dollars. So far, ZocDoc has reached a valuation of 1.8 billion US dollars, becoming one of the highest valuation private companies in New York. This financing also pushed ZocDoc into the "Unicorn Club."
The so-called "Unicorn Club" refers to startups that have not been listed and are valued at more than $1 billion. The concept of “$1 billion valuation†was proposed two years ago by venture capitalist Aileen Lee. She found that startups such as Facebook and LinkedIn, which can bring huge returns to investors, can exit with a valuation of $1 billion or more. Because of the scarcity of numbers, Lee called the company of this size a "unicorn." Being a "unicorn club" can be said to be the dream of all entrepreneurs.
The Wall Street Journal recently updated the 2015 Billion Dollar Evaluation Club List, with a total of 115 companies on the list. Among them, there are 76 in the United States, 27 in Asia, 10 in Europe, and 2 in the other.
Of course, most companies that enter this list, especially the top ones, are basically well-known startups. For example, currently the top three Uber, Xiaomi and Airbnb, the three valuations are 50 billion US dollars, 46 billion US dollars and 25.5 billion US dollars. It is gratifying to note that among the 27 Asian companies mentioned above, 15 are all Chinese, including Xiaomi, Didi, Lujin, Dajiang, Meituan and so on.
The Unicorn Club includes top-notch startups across the industry, with the most industry involved in software (35), followed by Internet consumption (25) and e-commerce (21). The medical industry ranked 5th, with 8 companies entering the Unicorn Club. Be aware that in January 2014, no medical industry startups entered this list. It was not until March 2014 that the first Boston-based company, Intarcia Therapeutics, entered the club for a value of $1.8 billion. Then, in June, two startups, Theranos and Proteus Digital Health, joined in. Startups in the medical industry began to develop rapidly in 2015. In January, the list of newer Modna was added. From April onwards, the speed of adding a new unicorn per month has been basically maintained. For now, the highest-ranking medical industry startup in the Unicorn Club is the startup, Theranos, which is going to subvert the blood test, with a valuation of $9 billion.
Let's take a look at the situation of these 8 companies.
1. Theranos
Theranos ranks 13th on the Unicorn Club list and is the number one in the medical industry. The company is valued at $9 billion and was listed in May this year. Currently, Theranos has conducted three rounds of financing with a total financing of more than $400 million. Including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Oracle founder Larry Ellison are all investors.
Blood analysis is an integral part of medicine. When a doctor wants to check your health status (such as cholesterol or blood sugar levels) or find an indication for a kidney or liver problem, he needs a blood test. In general, doctors need to use a long needle and several blood-filled test tubes to complete the blood collection, and then send the samples to the laboratory for analysis. In the United States, diagnostic laboratory testing is dominated by two companies, Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America. The annual output value of this business area is about $75 billion.
In the face of this lucrative business area, Theranos wants to change the situation. Founded in 2003, Theranos wants to make current blood tests faster, more convenient and cheaper. The new technology introduced by Theranos only requires a few drops of blood (about 50 microliters) from the patient's finger. This blood test method avoids the patient suffering from blood draw.
In 2013, Theranos announced a “long-term partnership†with Walgreens and established its own health center in most Walgreen chain pharmacies across the country. When a patient needs to perform a blood test at a health center, the trained pharmacist wraps the patient's finger with a warm sleeve to promote blood flow, and then wipes it with alcohol. The pharmacist then punctures the patient's fingers with a small square device (with a needle) and collects the two drops of blood into a ten-cent coin-sized container. The entire process takes about two minutes. The blood sample is placed in the freezer after being bar coded and then concentrated in the Theranos laboratory a few miles away. Every day, Theranos will arrange for the collection and return of such samples three times.
Theranos is well known, except for the technology that subverts blood tests, the company's founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The beautiful girl born in 1984 now has a net worth of $4.6 billion and is the youngest female billionaire in the United States. (Singularity has a long and long text, detailing the story of Theranos and founder Holmes, interested readers can poke directly here)
Holmes believes that blood testing should not be painful, but it should be a "good" experience. Therefore, Theranos' goal is to remove all obstacles in achieving the “Beauty Blood Test†process. Theranos has developed a blood test that can detect dozens of diseases, such as high cholesterol and cancer, all that is needed is to collect one or two drops of blood from the patient's fingers. Holmes said that they can use a blood sample to complete a variety of tests, each of which is cheaper than the standard test method. Sometimes, the price detected by Theranos is even 90% cheaper than the rate published by Medicare. For example, traditional labs need $55 or more to detect cholesterol, but Theranos only charges $2.99.
Theranos' technology has also attracted questions from some insiders, because the company is not as effective as it is.
2. Moderna Therapeutics
Moderna was founded in 2010 and is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. As of August 2015, the company's valuation reached $3 billion and it entered the Unicorn Club in January this year. Moderna has conducted three rounds of financing with a total financing of $950 million, including advance payments received from AstraZeneca ($240 million) and Alice ($100 million) and previous rounds of investment funding. In January of this year, the company completed the largest financing of biotech companies in history - 450 million US dollars. This financing has made Moderna the most valuable private company with venture capital support in the world's drug development industry.
"Fortune" has written that: Moderna may be the only revolutionary pharmaceutical company born in at least a decade, or at least equal to Google's support of Calico, which aims to delay cell aging.
Moderna's core technology is to help people make drugs in their own cells, rather than configuring drugs for taking or injecting in the lab (this is the practice of all other biotech companies). The specific method is to introduce messenger RNA into the patient. After the messenger RNA enters the human cell, the cell's expression system is used to make the protein needed for the treatment, and the patient can heal itself. Equally important, Moderna also claims that their designed messenger RNA does not trigger a common human immune response, which has led to past efforts on messenger RNA.
This not only makes many therapies possible, but also makes Moderna's products much shorter and cheaper than traditional drugs. Because it can use ordinary messenger RNA manufacturing equipment and processes to produce messenger RNA for a variety of conditions, rather than preparing separate manufacturing equipment for each disease, as is currently the case.
Moderna now has 45 active projects, some with in-house projects, some developed with strategic partners such as AstraZeneca and Alexion Pharmaceuticals, and they plan to launch more projects (in With these new investments, the company is expected to advance some projects to the second phase of clinical trials).
Moderna also handed over many projects to their own quasi-company operations, depending on the area of ​​treatment. This approach makes Moderna look like an incubator. In fact, some products can theoretically complete an initial public offering before Moderna.
But Moderna is also a mysterious company. As a private company, it rarely reveals its research work to the outside world. Its academic founder has only published a paper detailing the application of Moderna's mRNA therapy technology in rodents. The company itself only revealed the scientific details of mRNA treatment technology during the patent application process (including some details of the early work of this technology in non-human primates). This makes many people very doubtful, is Moderna worth looking forward to as it is said? How high is the strength of the patent? Other RNA-based drugs have caused many problems. Will Modernna's mRNA treatment technology repeat the same mistakes? Some experts said that there is no amazing result in the public information disclosed so far. For such remarks, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said: "I can understand their unhappiness. I can understand their heart. I can understand all their emotions. This is life!"
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