A digital health company that treats nicotine addiction like an engineering problem - precise heat, measurable exposure, and software that walks with the smoker.
The logo of a five-person company that has filed more than a hundred patents. Somewhere behind it is a founder who says the whole thing began with a smell.
Here is a fact about smoking that has been true for roughly a century: telling people to stop does not work very well. Something like 1.5 billion humans smoke, and the global health apparatus has spent decades explaining, in increasingly urgent fonts, that this is a bad idea. The smokers have, broadly, heard this. They are still smoking. This is the uncomfortable premise that WONZ Technology decided to build a company on top of.
The origin story, as the company tells it, is unusually specific. Its founder, Xin Du - who also goes by Steven, and who is separately a founding partner at a venture firm - was in a laboratory when he encountered the pure aroma of nicotine released by cured tobacco. The claim is that this smell reframed the problem for him. What if the harm in a cigarette is not really the nicotine, but the burning? Nicotine is the thing people are addicted to. Combustion is the thing that fills their lungs with tar and carbon monoxide and the long list of compounds that appear in cancer statistics. If you could separate those two - keep the nicotine, lose most of the smoke - you would have something that is not a cure, exactly, but is meaningfully less bad.
This is the logic of harm reduction, and it is philosophically slippery, which is part of what makes WONZ interesting. Harm reduction says: people are going to do the risky thing anyway, so let's make the risky thing less risky. It is the logic behind seatbelts and needle exchanges. Applied to cigarettes it makes public-health officials nervous, because it can look like an endorsement. WONZ has planted its flag firmly on the reduction side, and built hardware to match.
What they actually make
The product you can hold is a heat-not-burn device, sold to consumers under the brand name CIGPAL, in models with names like L1, L2 and Z2. The pitch is that it heats tobacco with enough precision - the company cites temperature control to within roughly a degree - that the tobacco releases nicotine without combusting. WONZ calls the underlying method WHC, for WONZ Heat Currents, and describes it as a thermal distillation technique. The company's claim is that this reduces inhalation of more than 90% of the main harmful substances, while a proprietary filter packed with microporous ceramic particles catches more on the way out.
Mr. Du Xin felt the pure nicotine aroma released by cured tobacco in the laboratory - and an alternative health solution for the 1.5 billion smokers around the world began to take shape in his mind.
The more distinctive move is what WONZ wraps around the device. Behavior change without measurement is mostly guessing, and WONZ pairs its hardware with a portable exhaled-carbon-monoxide tester - a small gadget that lets a smoker see a number that reflects their combustion exposure, and watch it move. On top of that sits digital intervention software the company calls Niketin, organized as "one platform, two terminals," with an AI assistant meant to coach users through cravings.
This is the part that makes WONZ a digital-health company rather than a gadget maker. The device meets the smoker where they are. The software is supposed to walk with them from there. Whether it works at population scale is genuinely unknown, but the company has at least gone looking for evidence: a July 2024 study run with Beijing Chaoyang Hospital reported that 56% of users kept using the device and that scores for craving and withdrawal fell. That is an early signal, not a regulatory trial, and it should be read as such. But it is more than most consumer nicotine products bother to produce.
WONZ has also wandered, in a way that tells you something about how it sees itself. There is a COPD intervention program for people whose lungs are already damaged. There is a herbal heat-activation series. And there is a non-invasive vagus-nerve-stimulation device aimed at insomnia and anxiety - which sounds unrelated until you notice that the connective tissue of the whole company is "delivering something precisely, through controlled stimulation, to change a stubborn physiological state." Seen that way, sleep is just another appetite the company thinks it can engineer around.
The consumer device (L1, L2, Z2) that heats tobacco without burning it, compatible with traditional cigarettes and built to cut most harmful byproducts.
A portable tobacco-addiction tester that measures exhaled carbon monoxide, so a smoker can track exposure as an actual number over time.
Nicotine-addiction management on "one platform, two terminals," combining the CO meter, a filter purifier and an AI assistant for coaching.
A digital intervention program extending WONZ's harm-reduction approach to people already living with chronic lung disease.
A non-invasive vagus-nerve-stimulation device targeting insomnia and anxiety - the company's bet that its methods generalize beyond nicotine.
WONZ Heat Currents: precise, low-temperature heating designed to stop harmful combustion byproducts at the source rather than filter them after.
Xin Du establishes WONZ with 25M RMB registered capital, near Beijing's Zhongguancun Life Science Park.
The team improves device functions, heat insulation and materials for its heat-not-burn hardware.
Secures tens of millions in financing from XVC and partners with MORPHEUS to expand online sales.
Surpasses 111 patent applications and is named to the POC50 list of top proof-of-concept startups.
Launches Niketin, a herbal heat series and a VNS sleep aid; a Chaoyang Hospital study reports 56% sustained use.
Reports latest funding and continues expanding manufacturing and international commercialization.
WONZ has raised more than US$13 million - reported as over 100 million RMB across rounds - from investors including XVC, Niniu Capital, and, more recently, a state-linked fund in Zhejiang's Yuhuan region tied to a manufacturing expansion. The founder's own venture background (his firm's investments reportedly include the social app Soul) means WONZ is the rare hardware startup run by someone who has sat on the other side of the table.
The competitive field is crowded and well-capitalized. On one side are the tobacco giants' reduced-risk products - Philip Morris's IQOS, BAT's glo - which have spent billions normalizing the heat-not-burn category. On the other are vapor products and the entire ecosystem of quit-smoking apps and nicotine-replacement therapy. WONZ's wager is that pairing a credible device with measurement and software, and treating the whole thing as digital therapeutics rather than a lifestyle gadget, is a defensible middle path. The patents are the moat it is betting on.
Heat-not-burn smart devices (sold as CIGPAL), a portable exhaled-carbon-monoxide tester, and digital intervention software aimed at reducing the harm from smoking and managing nicotine addiction.
Xin (Steven) Du, who is also a founding partner of Niniu Capital, founded the company in 2020 after experiencing the aroma of pure cured-tobacco nicotine in a lab.
Rather than vaporizing e-liquid or delivering nicotine through the skin, WONZ's WHC thermal distillation heats tobacco precisely to avoid combustion, and pairs the device with software and an exhaled-CO tester so users can measure their exposure.
A July 2024 study at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital reported 56% sustained device use and decreases in craving and withdrawal scores. It is an early-stage signal rather than a large regulatory trial.
WONZ has raised more than US$13 million (100M+ RMB across rounds) from investors including XVC, Niniu Capital and Zhejiang Yuhuan State-owned Investment.
Sources include WONZ Technology's own site and shop, its LinkedIn and social profiles, a 36Kr feature on the company's financing and digital solutions, Crunchbase and PitchBook. Figures such as patent counts, funding totals and the 90% harm-reduction and 56% sustained-use claims are as reported by the company and cited sources, and should be treated as approximate. Headquarters is listed as Hong Kong with R&D in Beijing.