"NewbornBio" Secures Tens of Millions of Yuan in Series B Financing to Accelerate the Development of Innovative Dietary Nutritional Supplement Ingredients | 36Kr Exclusive
36Kr has learned that Nanjing Newborn Biology (NNB Nutrition) has recently completed a tens of millions of yuan Series B financing. This round of financing is invested by Huaxi Yuanyou Fund, and the raised funds will be mainly used for the company's new product research and development, production, and market expansion, etc.
Newborn Biology was established in 2015, mainly providing innovative dietary supplement raw materials, semi-finished products and other products to the global market. Well-known domestic and foreign enterprises it has served include GNC, Nestle, Amazon, Huaxi Biology, etc. The founder, Liao Qilin, once worked for Sinochem Jiangsu Company, known as the "Whampoa Military Academy of Foreign Trade", responsible for the foreign trade of bulk commodities; Currently, the company's R & D team accounts for more than 30%, and the core R & D personnel have more than 20 years of working experience.
At the beginning of its entrepreneurship, Newborn Biology has established the positioning of creating high value-added raw materials. "In the dietary supplement raw material industry, many domestic companies adopt the strategy of reducing the production cost of existing products through new technologies or following the product selection of the foreign market. However, we hope to continuously conduct batch research and development and produce new raw materials that have not been commercialized globally, constantly creating new raw material 'trends'." Liao Qilin explained.
It is understood that since the establishment of Newborn Biology, it has successfully commercialized dozens of raw material varieties, including raw material single products with sales of tens of millions or over 100 million yuan. Currently, the company's product pipeline covers multiple fields such as weight loss, muscle gain, sugar control, anti-aging, brain health, emotion management, and immunity improvement, and it is expected to "maintain the speed of launching 5 - 10 innovative varieties every year" in the future.
Schematic diagram of Newborn Biology products
When talking about how the company maintains a continuous ability to innovate products, Liao Qilin introduced that in addition to continuously maintaining a collaborative innovation partnership with downstream food and health brands, it is also continuously strengthening the intensity of patent layout to establish a higher "technical moat" for raw material products.
"We hope to develop safe and effective dietary supplement raw materials in the way of developing innovative drugs," Liao Qilin said: "On the one hand, the efficacy directions of dietary supplements are limited, such as weight loss and anti-aging. Therefore, the product power and brand effect ultimately determine whether the product can break through. On the other hand, for many large B - end customers, the proportion of raw material procurement in the overall cost is not high, and they will pay more attention to the safety, patent protection, efficacy and other factors behind the product. If your raw materials are supported by scientific data, it will form a differentiated advantage."
Up to now, through its own cell and animal laboratory, as well as cooperation with domestic and foreign universities and CRO institutions, Newborn Biology has carried out nearly 50 preclinical and clinical experiments for its raw materials; the company is applying for more than 250 invention patents (including 100 PCT applications), and has obtained 32 invention patents authorized at home and abroad, and more than 180 registered trademarks at home and abroad.
"Our ultimate goal is to build Newborn Biology into a To B 'element brand'." In the product manufacturing process, the raw materials/components that play a key role in the quality or function of the terminal product are called key elements, which are the core factors that make the product a brand and affect consumers' purchasing behavior. In the field of dietary supplements, this "role" is naturally played by raw materials. "For our customers, the finished products will be marked with the raw material trademark of Newborn (NNB) and be protected by patents."
In the past few years, in overseas markets represented by the United States, the strategy of building an "element brand" by Newborn Biology has brought commercial success to the company. However, in China, in the past, downstream dietary supplement brands and consumers were not sensitive to the "labeling" of raw materials, and celebrity endorsements and traffic promotion were more common marketing methods. Can the strategy of "element brand" be successfully "copied" to the domestic market?
Liao Qilin did not deny the difficulty of this work, but he also mentioned that after starting to focus on the domestic market in the past few years, he has also discussed this method with many brands and received certain recognition. "From the market perspective, the current domestic dietary supplement market competition pattern is still relatively complex, and the problem of price wars is prominent. Many domestic brands actually also hope to explore a more differentiated path, and the formation of patent protection is conducive to improving the competition threshold."
It is worth mentioning that in addition to raw material supply, Newborn Biology is currently also trying to extend the "industrial chain" of these innovative raw materials, and develop and produce dietary supplement finished products for downstream customers based on the existing core raw materials, thereby improving the latter's work efficiency and reducing costs in the cross-border supply chain.
Newborn Biology Founder Liao Qilin said
We are very grateful to Huaxi Yuanyou Fund for its recognition of the company! Based on the huge market space of dietary supplements globally, Newborn Biology has been deeply engaged in the research and development and commercialization of upstream innovative raw materials for many years. With the full - chain innovation capability, it has successfully developed innovative raw materials that meet the needs of brand merchants in the fields of sports nutrition, anti - aging and whitening. In the future, with the help of investors, the company will continue to increase market promotion efforts, optimize R & D technology, and continuously provide innovative and high - quality functional raw materials for international and domestic dietary supplement brand enterprises, further promoting the development of the dietary supplement raw material industry.
Huaxi Yuanyou Fund Team said:
Innovative functional raw materials are the key to improving the nutritional and health effects of dietary supplements, and also one of the core driving forces for the continuous growth of the industry. Different from the mature development path of innovative drugs, the research and development of innovative raw materials related to dietary supplements has always lacked a systematic research and development link and strategy in the entire industry, and Newborn Biology is very hopeful to break this bottleneck.
In the most developed dietary supplement market in the United States, after more than ten years of exploration, Newborn Biology has become the industry's leading technology enterprise integrating the research and development, manufacturing and sales of innovative functional raw materials. In the R & D end, Newborn has established a raw material development platform based on chemical synthesis / synthetic biology, and also built a professional team for preparations, clinical development and patent layout. In the market end, Newborn has formed a market and marketing team including local personnel in the United States, covering more than 2,000 American brand enterprises and OEM enterprises including top brands such as GNC, Nestle, and Unilever. We believe that Newborn Biology is an international perspective enterprise that is different from functional raw material enterprises that achieve going global due to China's supply chain and cost advantages, but one that can affect the innovation trend of the dietary supplement industry and lead brand enterprises to choose what kind of raw materials. We expect more and more domestic dietary supplement brand enterprises to carry out strategic cooperation with Newborn Biology to promote the innovative development of the Chinese dietary supplement industry.
Huaxi Yuanyou Fund is the first domestic equity investment fund jointly initiated by Huaxi Biology and Langzi Hanya for the industrial incubation of start - up companies in the field of medical and health consumer goods, aiming to promote the application of cutting - edge biotechnology in the field of consumer health products and boost the industry development.