Recently, e-BLOT Life Sciences (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (“e-BLOT”) announced the completion of a Series A funding round totaling tens of millions of RMB, exclusively invested by the Ruili Synthetic Biology Fund. The proceeds will be primarily directed toward advancing the iterative upgrades of two core technology platforms — contact-based imaging and contact-based wet transfer — while comprehensively accelerating overseas market expansion to introduce China-originated technology into the global Western blot equipment market. Concurrently, the company will strengthen its R&D system, production lines, and comprehensive service capabilities, continuously refining its end-to-end Western blot product portfolio.

Company Overview

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in the Zhangjiang Science City of Shanghai, e-BLOT Life Sciences (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. is an innovative enterprise dedicated to the R&D, manufacturing, and global commercialization of premium life science research tools. The company focuses on technological innovation across the entire Western blot workflow. Leveraging the deep expertise of its interdisciplinary R&D team, e-BLOT is committed to breaking through overseas technological barriers with proprietary innovations, delivering one-stop protein research solutions to research institutions, medical centers, and biopharmaceutical companies worldwide.

Centered on the Western blot experimental workflow, the company pioneered contact-based imaging technology on a global scale, overcoming long-standing industry challenges associated with traditional cooled CCD systems — including signal attenuation, insufficient resolution, and significant quantitative deviation. The technology supports multiple detection modalities, including chemiluminescence and isotope detection, and is compatible with mainstream experimental applications such as Western blotting, nucleic acid blotting, and dot blotting. The company has established an integrated industrial chain encompassing hardware R&D, software development, and consumables manufacturing, along with standardized production and quality control processes that ensure stable mass production and global supply. In recognition of its technological innovation and product practicality, the company has received prestigious awards including the German Red Dot Design Award and the Shanghai Magnolia Award for Best Technological Innovation. Research conducted using the company’s products has been published in over 700 papers in international journals including Nature, establishing a new benchmark for Chinese high-end biological laboratory equipment and solidifying the company’s leading position in the global Western blot equipment market.

Technology and Products

The company’s two flagship product lines — the Touch Imager series (Lens-free Chemiluminescence Imaging System) and the EZ BLOT series (One-Touch Wet Transfer System) — form a complementary dual-flagship product portfolio spanning protein transfer and imaging detection. The Touch Imager, a Lens-free Chemiluminescence Imaging System, is the world’s first commercially available contact-based chemiluminescence imaging device. In fields such as proteomics, cancer immunology, and drug discovery — where detection of low-abundance proteins and precise quantification are routine requirements — traditional cooled CCD imaging systems often fall short of high-precision experimental standards. By employing a direct-contact imaging mode between the sample and the sensor chip, the Touch Imager achieves near-zero-loss optical signal capture, delivering ultra-high sensitivity, high-resolution imaging, and precise quantification. Its intuitive operation and robust stability effectively address the limitations of conventional equipment.

Touch Imager — Lens-free Chemiluminescence Imaging System

The other flagship product, the EZ BLOT One-Touch Wet Transfer System, addresses long-standing challenges of traditional protein wet transfer equipment, including cumbersome operation, low transfer efficiency, prolonged experimental time, and poor reproducibility. Utilizing the world’s first contact-based wet transfer technology, the device features one-touch operation that eliminates the need for manual parameter adjustments, significantly streamlining experimental procedures and reducing overall processing time. Its uniformly stable electric field design ensures efficient and balanced transfer of proteins across a wide range of molecular weights, markedly improving experimental reproducibility and data reliability. Together with the imaging system, it forms a closed-loop experimental workflow and is widely applied in basic life science research, target validation, drug screening, and other scenarios. These two flagship products complement each other, addressing critical pain points in two key stages of the Western blot workflow and providing researchers with an efficient, stable, and standardized new experience.

EZ BLOT — One-Touch Wet Transfer System

Building on its core technologies and flagship products, the company continues to expand its product portfolio, concurrently developing complementary reagents, specialized consumables, and intelligent data analysis software to achieve end-to-end integration of transfer, imaging, and data analysis. The company also actively explores cross-disciplinary applications, continuously unlocking the value of its proprietary technologies.

Global Expansion and Market Value

As a technology pioneer in the global Western blot equipment market, e-BLOT has embraced “global commercialization” as its foundational strategy since inception, positioning overseas markets as a key growth engine for the brand. The global life science instruments market offers vast opportunities, with overseas research institutions and multinational pharmaceutical companies sustaining high levels of R&D investment and driving strong demand for high-precision, high-stability premium laboratory equipment. At the same time, this sector has long been dominated by foreign brands, leaving substantial room for substitution and growth for “China-originated” innovations in high-end market segments. Leveraging its globally pioneering contact-based technology platform, e-BLOT is entering this high-value market with differentiated technological advantages, unlocking significant growth potential.

To date, the company has successfully expanded into major markets across Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Russia, establishing a global customer network and achieving breakthroughs at leading research institutions:

• In Japan, the products have been comprehensively adopted by core laboratories at six of Japan’s Imperial Universities — led by the University of Tokyo (including Kyoto University, Osaka University, Tohoku University, Nagoya University, and Hokkaido University) — and have been successfully deployed in the laboratory of a 2016 Nobel Laureate at the Institute of Science Tokyo.
• In Europe and North America, a top-tier research team led by Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, in collaboration with Yale University, has published high-impact papers using contact-based imaging technology. The products have been adopted by the University of Zurich and the University of Bern in Switzerland, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as by multinational corporations including Nestlé and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS).
• In China, the company covers nearly all prestigious 985 and 211 universities and serves the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) system, as well as top-tier medical institutions including Peking Union Medical College Hospital, West China Hospital, Ruijin Hospital, and Xiangya Hospital, along with multinational and leading pharmaceutical companies such as Roche and BeiGene.

The endorsement of top-tier research institutions and multinational corporations serves as a “global passport” for e-BLOT’s technological capabilities. Every high-impact paper published using the company’s equipment and every adoption by a flagship laboratory continuously builds brand trust. Overseas markets represent not only a growth frontier for e-BLOT, but also a critical arena for Chinese high-end life science instruments to evolve from “product export” to “standard export” and from “price competition” to “value competition.” As overseas channels and service systems continue to mature, the company is poised to exert greater influence in the global protein analysis equipment market.

Development vision

Mr. Zhang Zhihao, Co-founder of the company, stated: “Since its establishment, e-BLOT has remained deeply committed to the specialized field of Western blotting, addressing real-world research needs at the forefront. We pioneered the independent R&D and product commercialization of two core technologies — contact-based imaging and contact-based wet transfer — achieving breakthroughs from fundamental technology development and dual-core product mass production to large-scale market adoption both domestically and internationally, serving basic life science research and innovative drug discovery.

The company’s growth is inseparable from the tireless efforts of our entire team and the trust and support of research institutions, partners, and investors. In an environment of rapid technological iteration and intensifying market competition, we have consistently adhered to original innovation and a long-term development philosophy, dedicating ourselves to refining our technologies and products, and forging an independent innovation path for Chinese biological laboratory equipment.

Overseas markets are a key engine for e-BLOT’s future growth and a stage where China-originated technology can truly realize value enhancement. Following this funding round, we will accelerate new product iteration and global market expansion, with a focus on strengthening overseas channels, services, and localized operations. We strive to make China-originated contact-based technology the new standard for global Western blot imaging. We will continue to expand our product portfolio, drive the development of Chinese high-end life science instruments, and empower scientific progress through breakthrough innovation, facilitating the translation of more research outcomes into real-world impact.”

Dr. Huang Jiaxin, Partner at the Ruili Synthetic Biology Fund, stated: “We have long focused on life science innovations with global originality and platform value. e-BLOT has developed the world’s first contact-based imaging technology and contact-based wet transfer technology, and successfully commercialized two flagship products — the Touch Imager Lens-free Chemiluminescence Imaging System and the EZ BLOT One-Touch Wet Transfer System — demonstrating strong innovative capabilities and growth potential in the Western blot equipment market.

More importantly, the company’s breakthroughs at top-tier overseas research institutions have fully validated the global competitiveness of its technology, which is the true expression of its innovation value. We believe that with continued product upgrades and accelerated overseas market expansion, e-BLOT is poised to become a leading enterprise in the global protein analysis equipment market. We will fully leverage our industrial resources to support the company’s technological advancement, product promotion, and steady long-term global development.”