Tokyo-based healthtech startup I.W.G Inc. has raised $1.8 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures, via its fourth fund, according to its announcement on Tuesday.
Existing backer Antler also participated in the round, alongside radiologist and healthcare entrepreneur Dr. Toshihiko Sato, who is also an early customer of the company.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate the development of I.W.G’s AI-powered referral and interoperability platform and support its expansion across Asia.
The investment marks Golden Gate Ventures’s first deal in Japan from its fourth fund. The vehicle was launched in 2021 with a target size of $120 million, according to a previous DealStreetAsia report. While the firm has not publicly disclosed the fund’s final close or size, sources familiar with the matter said the fundraising process has been completed.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering and business development teams, deepen integration with healthcare providers, and further develop AI tools for workflow automation and multilingual healthcare data exchange.
Founded by CEO Xiaoyan (Fiona) Zhou and Xiaoxi (Bruce) Guo, I.W.G develops software that enables hospitals, clinics, insurers, and healthcare providers to exchange medical information across different systems, formats, and languages without requiring major infrastructure upgrades.
The company said its platform supports healthcare data standards and formats, including PDF, XML, HL7, and DICOM. Its AI referral technology is designed to interpret clinical information from incoming documents and convert it into formats required by receiving institutions.
The company is also developing capabilities to match information from referral documents against clinical guidelines and institution-defined protocols, reducing the time clinicians spend manually cross-referencing guidelines and lowering the risk of relying on outdated references.
I.W.G currently serves hospitals, clinics, teleradiology centres, medical tourism operators, and health screening providers across Japan, China, Singapore, and Indonesia. It has also seen growing demand from premium insurance providers and credit card programmes supporting overseas medical checkups, where language barriers and incompatible systems frequently create delays.
“What initially drew us to I.W.G was simple: Fiona and Bruce have already done this once,” said Justin Hall, partner at Golden Gate Ventures.
“They helped scale a successful medical AI company across some of the hardest regulatory markets in Asia. That kind of operational depth and insight is rare, and their first customers indicated the same: retention at this early stage, in healthcare IT, told us something fundamental about the product and team.”
According to Antler co-founder and managing partner Jussi Salovaara, I.W.G is addressing a key infrastructure challenge facing healthcare providers across the region.
“Many AI healthcare companies focus on applications built on top of existing systems. I.W.G is solving a more fundamental problem, enabling fragmented healthcare systems to actually work together,” Salovaara said.
Before founding I.W.G, Zhou led overseas operations for a China-based medical imaging AI company, overseeing deployments across multiple Asian markets. The company said the founding team has worked in the medical AI sector since 2016 and was involved in scaling a startup that later became a publicly listed unicorn.
