About VBData

VBData

VBData, published at vbdata.cn, is a Beijing-based healthcare-industry news and research platform for China, better known in Chinese as Dongmai Wang — the "Arterial Network" — and in English-language material as VCBeat. Founded in 2014, it publishes digital-health, biotechnology and medical-investment news, tracks financing and policy developments across China's health sector, and produces industry research, white papers and rankings for healthcare companies, investors and institutions. Where general business media cover Chinese healthcare as one sector among many, VBData covers nothing else: its entire editorial and research operation is devoted to how medicine, technology and capital are changing healthcare in China, and that specialisation has made it a reference point for the industry it reports on.

Overview and identity

VBData is best understood as a hybrid of news outlet, research institute and industry convenor. Its website carries daily healthcare news — company developments, financing announcements, product and regulatory news — while its research operation turns the same flow of information into reports, rankings and data products, and its events bring the companies and investors it covers together in person. That three-part model is visible in the names attached to its activities: VBData itself, VB100 for its rankings work, and VB Research for its research output, with VCBeat used as the English-facing brand name in international releases.

The platform's own description of its mission, given in international event releases, is to track and study the changes in the medical and health industry under global technological change, and to conduct research and reporting on the policies, capital, companies and figures that promote the industry's development. Those four subjects — policy, capital, companies and people — accurately describe the content a reader finds on vbdata.cn: government and regulatory developments that reshape the market, investment deals that fund new companies, the healthcare businesses themselves, and the entrepreneurs and executives building them.

Founding in 2014 and its Beijing base

VBData's parent platform, VCBeat, was founded in 2014, as the company states in its own international releases, which describe it as China's leading medical and health industry research and media platform. The timing matters. The mid-2010s were the period when digital health, biotechnology and healthcare investment were expanding rapidly in China, when large numbers of new medical technology companies were being founded and funded, and when investors, hospitals and policymakers needed a specialist source that followed the new sector day by day rather than treating health as an occasional business story. VBData was created for that audience, and its growth since has followed the growth of the innovative healthcare sector itself.

The platform is recorded in company profiles as based in Beijing, China's capital and one of the centres of its healthcare policy, research and investment life. Beijing is the seat of the national health and drug-regulatory authorities whose decisions shape the industry, home to leading hospitals, universities and research institutes, and a major centre for venture capital and healthcare company headquarters. A Beijing base places VBData's journalists and researchers close to the policymakers, institutions and investors whose decisions form a large part of its news, even though the companies it covers operate across China and, increasingly, internationally.

Names: VBData, VCBeat and the Arterial Network

Readers encountering this outlet for the first time often meet it under different names, and understanding them prevents confusion. In Chinese, the platform is Dongmai Wang, literally "Arterial Network," the name under which its Chinese-language site and reporting — credited in Chinese as Dongmai Wang and in English translations as Arterial Network — are known at home. VBData is the name attached to its domain, vbdata.cn, and to its data and rankings activities. VCBeat is the English brand used on its English-language pages and in international press releases, where its contact address and website are given as vbdata.cn and its releases are issued in the name of VCBeat.

These are not separate competing outlets but the faces of one organisation: a Chinese-language industry news service, a data and research operation, and an English-facing presence that reports Chinese healthcare developments to international readers and partners. Other industry coverage routinely treats them as interchangeable — a financing story, for example, may be credited to Arterial Network in one publication and published on vbdata.cn under the VCBeat name in another — because the underlying newsroom and research team are the same.

Healthcare industry news: companies, policy and technology

News is the foundation of VBData's work. The platform reports across the breadth of China's innovative healthcare sector: biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, digital health, medical services and the supply chains and service providers around them. Its coverage follows individual companies — their products, partnerships, regulatory milestones and business results — because in a sector built on innovation, the progress of a single therapy, device or platform can change a whole market segment, and because its professional readers follow specific companies as competitors, partners, suppliers or investments.

Policy and technology are reported with the same closeness. Healthcare in China is heavily shaped by national policy and regulation, so VBData tracks the policy developments that alter how products are approved, bought and paid for, alongside the technology trends — artificial intelligence in medical imaging, digital therapeutics, brain science, synthetic biology, regenerative materials, nuclear medicine and medical robotics among the fields highlighted at its 2024 ecological fair — that create new categories of company. Its English-language service extends this reporting to global readers, with material on subjects such as Chinese pharmaceutical companies presenting research at international conferences and on cross-border deals, reflecting the platform's stated aim of helping international audiences understand the Chinese healthcare market.

Investment and financing coverage

Capital is the second great subject of VBData's reporting, and the one that most clearly separates it from clinical or consumer health media. China's innovative healthcare sector is financed substantially by venture capital and private investment, especially before companies list on a stock exchange, so the platform systematically tracks financing rounds: which company raised money, how much, from which investors, and with what advisers. A representative item from its English service reported a medical device company completing a 300 million yuan Series A round with participation from CMB International and CITIC Medical and Health — the kind of precise, deal-level reporting that investors and companies use to follow the market.

That deal-by-deal coverage is aggregated into regular market intelligence. VCBeat publishes monthly reporting on global healthcare investment and financing, summarising the number of financing events and the amounts disclosed, identifying the largest deals, the most active investors and significant licensing transactions, and presenting the result as what it calls a data-driven navigation tool for the ecosystem. For readers inside the industry, this turns a news archive into a market record: evidence of which fields are attracting capital, which investors are active, and how the funding climate for healthcare innovation is changing over time.

Research, white papers and digital therapeutics reporting

VBData's research arm — operating as VB Research and, in its rankings work, alongside the Eggshell Research Institute — converts its industry knowledge into formal publications. The clearest documented example is its work on digital therapeutics, or DTx. VCBeat states that it was the first media organisation to follow DTx in China, that it began focusing on the field in 2016, and that it has published hundreds of articles on the subject. It published a China Digital Therapeutics Industry White Paper in 2021 and a second version, White Paper 2.0, and in 2022 it released a Global Digital Therapeutics Industry Report jointly with the Hainan Provincial Health Commission, assisted by industry partners and with the Digital Therapeutics Committee of the China Association for Medical Devices Industry as consultant.

That sequence — early news coverage of an emerging field, followed by white papers and then a global report produced with a provincial health authority — shows how the platform's research model works. Journalists identify and follow a new sector before it is widely recognised; the research operation organises what has been learned into reference documents; and partnerships with official and industry bodies give those documents standing beyond the platform itself. VCBeat said the DTx reports had a far-reaching impact and greatly promoted the development of the industry in China, an illustration of how a specialist outlet can help shape, as well as report, the sector it covers. Its research output has continued in the same vein, including later industry reports such as its Healthcare AI Industry Report.

The Future Healthcare 100 and VB100 rankings

The best-known product associated with VBData is the Future Healthcare 100 list, known as VB100. Established in 2015, it is described by the platform as China's first innovation-focused healthcare ranking for non-listed companies, launched by VB100, VBdata and the Eggshell Research Institute. Its stated aim is to identify China's leading innovators in healthcare, discover the core forces of the future medical industry and promote innovation in the health industry. Because it covers non-listed companies, the ranking reaches the part of the sector — young, private, fast-growing firms — that stock-market reporting cannot cover, which is precisely the part of the industry VBData's readers most need to identify.

The ranking has expanded considerably from a single list. VBData's own overview notes that over its first seven years the selection system grew to include enterprises, investment institutions and industrial parks, evolving into a broader innovation healthcare evaluation ecosystem extending to innovative products and technologies. By 2018, the Arterial Network was unveiling four flagship lists at its Beijing forum — covering Chinese healthcare, pharmaceuticals, health and overseas companies — together with sub-lists for specialised fields and rankings of industrial parks and cities. More recent editions describe a formal evaluation process involving enterprise self-nomination, review by the VB100 evaluation committee, cross-review by supporting institutions and final approval by an expert committee, using a VB100 value assessment model that takes an enterprise's latest post-investment valuation as a core index alongside human resources, knowledge resources, important partner resources and market performance.

Conferences: from the Future Healthcare 100 Forum to VBEF

VBData's rankings are released at major industry gatherings that the platform itself hosts, making events the third pillar of its operation alongside news and research. In December 2018, the Arterial Network's Future Healthcare Top 100 Forum was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing, drawing more than 2,500 health and medical industry participants from China and abroad for the release of that year's lists and industry report. The sixth Future Healthcare Top 100 Conference, hosted by VBData in June 2022, was held online, while the seventh summit in May 2023 released the 2023 Future Healthcare 100 List.

In 2024 the event was upgraded and renamed. The platform announced that the Future Medical Top 100 Conference, held for seven consecutive years, would become the VBEF Future Healthcare Ecological Fair, hosted by VB100, VCBeat, VB Research and VBdata and jointly sponsored by Zhongguancun Development Group and the Tianjin Binhai Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park Management Committee. The eighth fair, themed "New Youth," was held at the Beijing Beiren Yichuang International Convention and Exhibition Center from 7 to 10 May 2024, and the platform reported that it attracted over ten thousand participants, including academicians, experts and entrepreneurs, released a Healthcare Industry Innovation Product List of 200 products and solutions across biopharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, digital technology and supply chain fields, and facilitated international collaborations. An event on that scale confirms VBData's position not only as a chronicler of China's healthcare innovation community but as one of its principal convenors.

Services for companies, investors and international partners

Beyond publishing, VBData presents itself as a service provider to the industry it covers. Its English-language pages state that it helps global healthtech companies, investors and institutions find the right local partners in China — from distributors and licensees to investment targets and research and development collaborators — and that it provides comprehensive advisory services to global healthtech companies, international investors and institutions seeking to understand, assess and enter the complex Chinese healthcare market. That offer follows naturally from its assets: a newsroom that follows Chinese healthcare companies continuously, research that maps sectors and rankings that identify leading firms are exactly the knowledge a foreign company or investor needs before entering the market.

For domestic readers, the equivalent value lies in its data and intelligence: continuous financing records, monthly market reports, sector white papers and rankings that companies use to benchmark themselves and that investors use to screen opportunities. In both directions, VBData monetises and applies the same underlying resource — structured, specialist knowledge of China's healthcare industry, accumulated through daily reporting since 2014.

Audience, significance and official website

VBData's audience is professional rather than general: healthcare company founders and executives, medical and biotechnology investors, hospital and industry-park managers, researchers, policymakers and the advisers who serve them, together with international readers who need an English-language window on Chinese healthcare. For that audience, the platform performs functions that general media cannot: it notices small, unlisted companies early, records their financing in a consistent series, evaluates them in an annual ranking, studies emerging fields such as digital therapeutics in formal reports, and gathers the whole community at its conferences.

That is VBData's significance in China's media landscape. Founded in 2014 as VCBeat — Dongmai Wang, the Arterial Network — it grew alongside China's innovative healthcare sector and became one of the specialist institutions through which that sector understands itself. VBData is published online at https://www.vbdata.cn, which is recorded as its official website in WorldNM's directory, with the outlet based in Beijing, China.