Deep Principle is a Hangzhou, China company founded in late 2023 by a team with roots at MIT. CEO Jia Haojun earned his PhD in physical and computational chemistry at MIT and previously worked in Dow Chemical's core R&D division on AI-driven catalyst formulation. CTO Chenru Duan is also an MIT PhD who was a research scientist at Microsoft Quantum. Heather Kulik, their PhD advisor at MIT, is chief scientist, and COO Luyang Zhang is an MIT alumnus. The company frames its approach as the ECML paradigm, a unified AI decision framework coordinating Experiment, Compute and Machine Learning rather than treating them as separate stages. Its flagship AI Scientist platform, upgraded into an agentic system called Mira, unifies six algorithmic modules: ReactGen for materials generation, Reactify for precision computation, ReactControl, ReactBO for broad screening, ReactNet for synthesis navigation and ReactHTE for high-throughput experiments. Its diffusion generation model OA-ReactDiff and successor React-OT were published as cover papers in Nature Computational Science and Nature Machine Intelligence; the company states React-OT predicts transition-state structures in roughly 0.4 seconds on a single GPU. Deep Principle works with corporate clients either through platform access or co-development deals with upfront payment plus royalties, and counts L'Oreal among its customers, co-developing cosmetic active ingredients. Current focus areas are specialty chemicals, cosmetics and personal care, and renewable energy for batteries. It is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and received a 2026 WAIC SAIL award.
Funding
The company has stated it has raised a total of over $100 million in private capital, as reported by The Innovator in July 2026. Individual round sizes, dates and investors have not been publicly confirmed.