Not happy with your nose, face, fingers or some parts of your body and want to locate the best cosmetic medical services center near your home? There’s an app for that in China.
Plastic surgery app Meilimei has landed tens of millions of USD in Series B financing, Chinese tech news site iyiou.com reported on Wednesday.
This round of fundraising was led by Skyview Capital, a private investment firm based in Los Angeles with a brewing portfolio of tech companies centered around mobile and networking.
The funds will be used to promote doctors, upgrade core technology and promote plastic surgery products, according to CEO Ren Lingfeng in an interview.
In 2014, Meilimei secured tens of millions of RMB from tech giant Alibaba.
Founded in 2013, Shanghai-based Meilimei aims to work with well-known medical centers, health centers, hospitals, nail care centers, hair salons, and fitness centers to provide one-stop services for women and bring more patients to hospitals using their online platform.
On this app, customers can also discuss hot health and beauty topics on different discussion boards and buy beauty products and tools from Chinese stores and stores abroad. Meilimei mainly makes money from aesthetic and medical centers according to the services they provide.
Third party e-commerce platforms like Meilimei can help make pricing and competition between aesthetic medical services more transparent. Meilimei has 12.6 million active users while its rival Medaila has 10 million.
The platform now has one million registered female users and tens of thousands of postings every day. Zhao said that they want to expand to more than 10 million users and so far have no plans to open it to men.
The medical beauty market is booming in China because it has less policy restrictions than traditional medical procedures. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, China has a market penetration rate of 0.8% in the aesthetic medical industry as of 2011 and the market is predicted to reach USD 15.4 billion in 2017, with a growth rate of 25%. HSBC analyst Yumeng Wang predicts that China will be the world’s third largest aesthetic and medical market, behind the US and Brazil.
Many online platforms are mushrooming in China, trying to tap into the huge aesthetic medical services market. SoYoung, backed by Tencent, closed a USD 50 million financing round this month. Meidaila, backed by IDG Capital Partners, secured a financing round of USD 12 million last October and Yuemei, an online marketplace for cosmetic procedures, closed its series B round at the end of 2015.
（Top photo from Nipic.com）