(Yicai Global) July 30 -- Meitu, the developer of China's leading selfie app, has led the latest round of financing in the country's largest community app for the consumer medical sector.

Wanmei Creative Technology has bagged USD50 million in a D1-round of funding from Meitu and Daohe Fund of Funds, online news outlet Sina Tech reported.

Set up in 2013 in Beijing, Wanmei Creative provides some 35 million users with community, e-commerce and financial services related to plastic surgery, micro-plastics, dental, ophthalmology, anti-aging and other consumer medical fields. The platform covers more than 7,000 medical institutions and 20,000 practicing doctors across 300 cities globally, mainly in China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore.

The rapid influx of millennial and generation X consumers into the market can provide a real golden age for the medical and beauty industry over the next decade, Chief Executive Liu Di said. As an online portal for the sector, Wanmei Creative connects online traffic and offline merchants, while working with upstream and downstream companies to create an ecosystem based on user reputation. It also seeks to draw on experience from the beauty industry for growth in consumer medical fields such as dentistry, ophthalmology, obstetrics and gynecology, and anti-aging.

China's medical beauty market was worth some CNY176 billion (USD25.8 billion) last year and is expected to reach CNY464 billion in 2020, research from Deloitte shows. The sector is expected to post an average annual compound growth rate of about 40 percent.

Wanmei Creative will mainly use funds from this round for alternative technology research and development, investments in personnel, as well as geographical expansion.

Meitu owns software and hardware products including Meitu Xiuxiu, BeautyCam, as well as a mobile phone series, and its mainly female user base bears similarities with that of Wanmei Creative. Meitu positions itself as a beauty and social networking firm, and even though the two companies have very different businesses, they complement each other.

Wanmei Creative will introduce Meitu's imaging and big data technology to establish a medical aesthetic intelligence engine. The engine can help millions of users to obtain value reports regarding their unique faces and aesthetic advice by uploading their photos. The app will even recommend the most suitable medical and beauty programs, clinics and doctors to the user.

Editor: William Clegg