"You wouldn't lend out a shovel that can dig up gold" | A Conversation with Lu Ziheng of Kaiwu Ji: Using AI to Invent New Materials

🚥 This week's Crossing guest is Ziheng Lu, founder of MatX (开物纪). Fresh out of the gate, his company landed a nine-figure RMB seed round with an impressive investor lineup: Monolith led the round, with Luminous Ventures and JAFCO Asia joining in, while returning shareholders Hillhouse, IDG, BlueRun Ventures, Baidu Venture, and L2F Light Source Entrepreneurs Fund all doubled down.

MatX's mission is to use AI to discover and validate new materials that can "change the fate of humanity" faster — and shepherd them from the lab to scalable, commercial production.

Ziheng will walk us through: when we talk about AI inventing materials, what exactly is the AI "inventing," where are the bottlenecks, and how does commercialization actually unfold?

Ziheng also advises PhD students at Zhongguancun Academy. We talked about learning and talent in the AI era: how should you learn when tools and paradigms shift this fast? Is a PhD still worth it? And how do you know whether you're cut out for academia or for the front lines of industry?

Finally, while this episode focuses on AI for materials, it holds lessons for anyone trying to apply AI to a vertical industry: from how to define the problem, to accumulating high-quality data, to embedding large AI model capabilities into business workflows and building sustainable delivery and commercial loops — these methods transfer across sectors.

More fundamentally, nearly every AI + vertical industry faces the same question: when you've finally built the "shovel" that can dig up gold (the model and capability), do you hand it to others, or do you pick it up and start digging yourself?

🎬 Our video podcast is now live on @Koji Yang Yuancheng's channels: WeChat Video, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and YouTube.

📒 The transcript will be published on the @CrossingCrossing WeChat official account.

🟢 00:00:43 Rapid Fire

Age, alma mater, MBTI and zodiac sign, one-sentence intro to MatX, funding status, revenue and profit, team size, pre-founder experience

🟢 00:02:44 What a Single Material Can Be Worth

From why Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley, to how a powder discovered by a Japanese team underpins the entire solid-state battery industry. The essence of materials, it turns out, is a "game of placing atoms on a blank sheet of paper." The most lucrative material IP in history has been concentrated in remarkably few hands — Goodenough alone created most of the core materials in lithium-ion batteries. MatX wants to use AI to manufacture such people at scale. You discover a material — then what? How does it become money?

🟢 00:08:10 The Flagship Pioneering of Materials

He's benchmarking neither Dow nor BASF, but the fund that incubated Moderna. "If I could really dig up gold, I definitely wouldn't hand the shovel to someone else first." Two categories of targets are running in parallel: one "to get rich," the other "to show muscle" — which two? And why does he believe this industry needs someone to go end-to-end first and blaze a complete trail?

🟢 00:14:12 That Day, After Dinner, They Tested Something on a Whim

A moment that stunned everyone — yet no one said a word aloud — became the origin point for MatX. Why didn't these scientists publicize it? How does Ziheng describe them? What capability leap did they witness, and what did it have to do with GPT-3.5? How did DALL-E's unexpected emergence influence the technical path for materials models?

🟢 00:19:12 Differentiation? We're Not at Competition Yet

"Right now, nobody should treat making a good material with AI as a competition." — Why does he say this? He believes the real moat in this space lies not in models, not in compute, but in something extremely hard to replicate. How do the American companies in this space — Periodic Labs, Project Prometheus, CuspAI — differ from MatX's approach?

🟢 00:22:49 Gram Scale, Kilogram Scale, Then What

AI doesn't need to search the entire universe — it just needs to find one that can sell. From AI proposing candidate materials to a customer willing to validate on their own production line — how many steps in between? He calls the whole thing "violent aesthetics" — why have AlphaFold, LLMs, and embodied AI all taken this same path? Where in this pipeline does AI create the most value?

🟢 00:27:43 Three Offers Signed, Hands Shaking

Where does the money go? Lab? Compute? People? The answer may defy intuition. Why does he say commercial feedback isn't a compromise on research, but actually accelerates it? What lessons do DeepSeek and embodied robotics hold for AI for Science?

🟢 00:35:33 In Interviews Now, I Don't Know What to Ask Anymore

Knowledge questions — GPT answers them all, with broader expertise than mine. How did he learn generative models? Without reading a single paper. He says two types of capabilities will become nearly worthless within five years — which two? Taste, Vision, Initiative — what's his priority ranking for these three in the AI era?

🟢 00:47:38 Message to Himself in 10 Years: Still Got the Energy?

From undergrad goal of "3,000 RMB monthly salary," to Cambridge, to Microsoft, to founder — what drove each transition? Why, despite years abroad, does he almost never feel homesick? His explanation is unexpected. Is a PhD worth it? His answer is brutally concise.

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🚦 "Crossing" is Steve Jobs' metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry. We seek out, interview, and bring together a new generation of AI founders and active builders in the AI era. Together, we explore and embrace the changes and new possibilities.

👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing and launched AI Hacker House, a community space for the new generation of AI entrepreneurs. I serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, represents the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji's Jike, Koji's website

👧🏻 Host Ronghui: I co-founded Crossing. I've worked at a dollar-denominated VC and spent five years as a Silicon Valley correspondent, tracking technology development and business stories. Feel free to reach out and chat. Ronghui's Jike