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Q&A with AI · How Will Saint Bella Investment’s Embodied Intelligence Redefine the Future of Family Nursing?

Mr. Xiang leads with Saint Bella again, making an appearance in the LP circles.

Industry sources say that Asia’s leading family nursing provider Saint Bella has released an announcement, planning to invest in a Hangzhou embodied intelligence industry fund. A few days ago, it just said it had reached a strategic partnership with L Catterton, a fund under LVMH. In the span of a week, two deals—such a pace is not very common.

At this point, it’s been only 9 months since Saint Bella’s IPO. Back in June 2025, Saint Bella—dubbed the “most expensive postpartum center”—officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with Mr. Xiang, an Oxford University graduate, holding the helm behind the scenes. Recently, Investment Circle conducted an interview with Mr. Xiang, discussing the layout and thinking behind the LP.

(This is Mr. Xiang, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of the Saint Bella Group)

Right now, China’s primary market has long struggled with difficult fundraising, and every market-oriented LP feels especially precious. After talking with Mr. Xiang, we can faintly see a trend: China’s New Money is starting to become active in the venture capital and startup world, putting funds into cutting-edge technology.

Two investment checks in a row within a week

A new class of LPs is born

Mr. Xiang first talked about his partnership with L Catterton.

This seems like a coincidence written in the stars. In the early days of starting the business, Saint Bella set out to become “LVMH in the health and nursing industry.” Now it has reached a strategic partnership with L Catterton, a fund under LVMH. Mr. Xiang told Investment Circle that this strategic partnership includes a plan for Saint Bella to contribute as an LP to a renminbi fund investing with L Catterton.

“L Catterton is backed by the LVMH ecosystem, with top-tier genes in the luxury goods industry. In the future, we hope to use L Catterton’s global network to accelerate Saint Bella’s overseas expansion—further refining its brand matrix through investment and mergers and acquisitions.” Mr. Xiang added that based on their shared understanding of the broad trend of global consumption and health industry upgrades, the two sides reached an agreement within a very short time.

In fact, this is not Saint Bella’s first time investing in a consumer fund. Even before the IPO, Saint Bella, as an LP, invested in the Shengwang Fund—a market-oriented consumer equity fund jointly built by the New Hope Group and Grassroots Capital Group.

In the latest move, Saint Bella is acting as an LP for an embodied intelligence fund. After market close yesterday (March 24), Saint Bella announced that it would invest in the Hangzhou embodied intelligence industry fund, which is jointly initiated by Shanghai Dunhong Assets and Hangzhou state-owned capital.

Why would a family nursing group want to get into embodied intelligence? “Besides financial returns, we more hope to be able to connect with resources across different vertical scenario domains.” Mr. Xiang explained the underlying logic.

Speaking of it, over the past year, Mr. Xiang has put almost all his personal energy into the embodied intelligence industry chain. He laid out a path for how an outsider can quickly succeed in a cross-industry move—by leveraging the resources of VC/PE institutions to arrange meetings with founders of leading companies in the sector, systematically going through the typical companies across the entire ecosystem chain one by one. Direct exchanges with top first-line talent in the industry make things incredibly efficient.

The urgency is palpable. Mr. Xiang believes: In the next 10 to 20 years, the family nursing industry will inevitably rely on embodied intelligence. If you don’t start planning and deploying now, it will be too late.

But Saint Bella does not engage in hardware manufacturing or large model R&D. Instead, it focuses on building the “brain” of nursing robots—nursing decision-making capabilities. It has already launched its own AI Agent, “Dr. Bella.” More is being rolled out as well: by end of 2025, it strategically invested in the maternal-and-child AI service provider WITH 1000 AI, and it also partnered with Yunj i Technology to explore the deployment of service robots in nursing scenarios. This investment in an embodied intelligence industry fund can be seen as a further extension and reinforcement of its “physical hardware” strategy.

“Many excellent embodied-intelligence companies—including some founders of companies with relatively high valuations—are willing to come to our company to discuss. Because Saint Bella’s service scenarios are extremely scarce; everyone needs real-data testing and scenario deployment.” Mr. Xiang said that entering family scenarios is a core direction that embodied companies are all trying.

The hardest part among this is data collection—family data is hard to buy, and it’s also hard to do simulation and lab testing. As a result, Saint Bella seems like a particularly suitable partner. Mr. Xiang disclosed that in the future, they may team up with more leading embodied intelligence companies.

Turning a postpartum center into a public company

Tencent also invested

Let’s go back to half a year ago, when Mr. Xiang brought Saint Bella into the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

His life résumé is impressive: born in 1986, he went abroad for schooling as a teenager and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Oxford University. After graduation, he entered the Hong Kong branch of a Swiss bank and began his medical and healthcare investment career.

During that time, he was keenly aware that millennials and Gen Z were beginning to enter childbearing age, but family nursing—especially postpartum care—was still not able to meet the needs of today’s high-end customers. The high-end maternal-and-child nursing market remained a blank. That sparked the idea to start a business. Until 2017, Mr. Xiang left UBS and founded Saint Bella in Hangzhou, together with medical consultants from top schools such as MIT and Oxford University.

In the early days of entrepreneurship, the questions Saint Bella faced were far more than anyone might imagine. Coming from an investment-banking background, with no experience in the maternal-and-child industry, how could it deliver meticulous and professional postpartum services? Especially since it also proposed a new model—postpartum centers plus upscale hotels. At that time, neither potential partners nor investors bought into it.

After that, Mr. Xiang kept knocking after multiple rejections until he finally got into the door of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Hangzhou. Different from the traditional model of postpartum centers supplied by “mothers/nannies,” this “asset-light” model of leasing hotels not only saved a large amount of time and cash flow needed to build on its own, but also better matched its high-end positioning. Starting with the first hotel, Saint Bella reached a turning point and began to expand in all directions.

Public information shows that Saint Bella’s 28-day postpartum package started at 138,000 yuan, while on e-commerce platforms its “Queen Package” is even as high as more than 500,000 yuan—dubbed the “Hermès of the postpartum world.”

Investors started coming knocking. One year after its founding, Gao Rong Capital and Tangzhu Capital brought 20 million yuan in pre-A and A rounds to Saint Bella. In 2021, there was also a 200 million yuan C round led by Tencent, setting a record at the time for a single financing deal in China’s maternal-and-child nursing industry. In addition, C Capital, China Life Investment, Zhejiang Sh… Assets, Sun Hung Kai, and Shenqi Capital all threw out olive branches.

On June 26, 2025, Saint Bella rang the bell on the Hong Kong market, becoming the first listed stock in Hong Kong for high-quality family nursing. The story behind its listing in Hong Kong is overseas expansion. Today, Saint Bella has opened stores in Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney, London, Paris, and the United States. Its phased goal is to complete full coverage of first-tier global cities.

Through early strategic acquisitions and investments, Saint Bella has formed a full-industry-chain layout covering postpartum centers, postpartum recovery, family nursing, and a new retail business in health food.

China’s New Money is here

Back to Mr. Xiang: after the company went public, he began appearing frequently in LP circles. “By becoming an LP, we stand on the shoulders of venture capital institutions with deep experience, enabling us to build new understanding quickly.” Mr. Xiang did not hide his thinking.

He believes that the most core barrier between companies in the future is whether they can continuously maintain leading cognition. Apart from that, almost everything else can be achieved with money and time. And by accumulating know-how, they can further widen the lead over competitors.

Of course, Saint Bella is also actively embracing AI. Through its investing “feelers,” Saint Bella hopes to transform from a family nursing brand into a luxury brand whose value is amplified by technology.

This kind of logic is also one of the reasons why many of China’s New Money participants show up in the venture capital world. Especially for those Chinese billionaires who started with real businesses, their eyes are turning toward technology tracks that matter for the future.

Just as with Mihayou and Bubble Mart, these super new rich have been active in LP circles in recent years and have invested in multiple VC funds. Not long ago, Minghui Investment—an investment arm of Zhu Xingming, chairman of A-share leader Inovance Technology—made a move, investing 10 billion yuan into the embodied-intelligence unicorn Qianxun Intelligent.

This generation of Chinese entrepreneurs is collectively saying goodbye to the investment paths of the past—real estate and traditional manufacturing are no longer the top choice. Instead, they look toward frontier directions like AI, embodied intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, and nuclear fusion. Behind these shared choices, a consensus has quietly formed: future incremental growth won’t be found in rebar and concrete, but in the world of data and algorithms.

This is a vivid example of the global technology race. From Old Money to New Money, they are betting on China’s boundless sea of opportunities in technology.