Linear Capital seed-stage portfolio company Deep Principle, an AI-driven chemistry and materials science enterprise, has completed a seed+ round with an exclusive investment from Hillhouse.

Recently, AI-driven materials R&D startup Deep Principle announced the completion of its seed+ funding round, with an exclusive investment from Hillhouse. The proceeds will be used to deepen the company's technology R&D, expand its team, and accelerate partnerships with global chemical and materials enterprises — pushing the practical application of generative AI in chemistry and materials science. Linear Capital led the company's seed round.

Founded in 2024, Deep Principle is a global leader in AI+Chemistry innovation. Through breakthroughs and applications in AI technology, the company aims to lead innovation in chemical materials and drive technological progress across global chemistry, materials, energy, and pharmaceuticals — enabling more efficient industrial production and a cleaner energy future. The company is led by founder and CEO Dr. Haojun Jia and founder and CTO Dr. Chenru Duan, with a hybrid team of PhDs from top institutions including MIT, Stanford, Zhejiang University, and Fudan University, alongside professionals from global enterprises such as Microsoft, Meta, Dow Chemical, BASF, JD.com, and Tencent. The team brings rich experience in both AI-chemistry integrated R&D and industrial commercialization.

A Hillhouse project lead commented: "We're delighted to participate in this investment. Deep Principle's team is young, driven, and possesses original innovation capabilities alongside a proven ability to solve real industry problems. With remarkably elegant algorithms, they're optimizing the most valuable yet most difficult aspects of chemical reactions — with the potential to achieve industry-wide breakthroughs. We believe in Deep Principle's ability to drive the next transformation in chemical materials, and look forward to the company bringing fresh momentum and energy to innovation across the global materials and chemicals industry."

New materials are critical enablers of new industrialization, a strategic emerging industry strongly supported by national policy, and an important direction for accelerating the development of new quality productive forces and advancing high-quality development. However, the high costs, low success rates, and long timelines of original innovation in new materials represent significant challenges faced by chemical and materials enterprises worldwide. Traditional materials R&D, constrained by experience-led, experiment-driven trial-and-error methods, has hit bottlenecks in the exploration of innovative materials. Deep Principle focuses on reshaping the materials R&D process through artificial intelligence — optimizing existing critical chemical reactions and discovering key new materials and reactions.

Deep Principle has taken the industry lead in solving important frontier technical challenges including AI-based efficient prediction of chemical reaction transition states. Its core algorithm modules currently comprise four components:

• ReactControl: Uses multiple ML models for real-time decision-making, achieving the optimal balance between cost and accuracy. ReactControl saves more than half of evaluation time and costs;
• ReactBO: Combines Bayesian algorithms and active learning to discover chemical materials and optimize reaction conditions, identifying synthesizable target materials across a 32.5 million-sized materials space with 1000x acceleration;
• Reactify: Employs a recommendation algorithm engine for method selection and improvement decisions, reducing error by sixfold and enabling high-throughput DFT calculations to reach experimental precision for the first time;
• ReactGen: Uses generative AI for active generation and rapid sampling of novel chemical materials and reactions, employing inverse design without needing to screen the full 10^60 chemical materials space.

Based on these technologies, Deep Principle has completed a closed-loop R&D process from discovery to performance optimization for entirely new chemical materials — making materials development faster, better, and cheaper. Strategic investments and comprehensive collaboration with industry leaders including XtalPi and DP Technology will further accelerate the company's mission of empowering the new materials industry. Deep Principle founder and CEO Dr. Haojun Jia stated: "We sincerely thank our new and existing shareholders for their continued trust and support. This funding round represents strong recognition of Deep Principle's past achievements. We will leverage Hillhouse's powerful resource network and extensive industry experience to accelerate our pace in product iteration, technology commercialization, and international market expansion. Deep Principle will focus on breakthroughs at key points to drive broader transformation, promoting innovation and optimization in chemical materials, empowering global materials, chemicals, energy, and pharmaceutical industries, driving a new wave of productivity revolution, and bringing more efficient and sustainable solutions to global markets."

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About Linear Capital

Linear Capital is an early-stage investment firm focused on the "frontier technology + industry" direction — that is, frontier technologies represented by data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics, and new technological transformations in traditional domains (such as biomedicine, materials, and energy), applied across vertical industries to substantially improve industrial efficiency, empower solutions to pain points, and complete industrial upgrading — achieving excess returns through substantial increases in industrial value. The firm currently manages ten funds with total assets under management of approximately $2 billion.

Our investment stage focuses primarily on leading angel to Series A rounds, with individual investments ranging from $1 million to $10 million (or RMB equivalent).

To date, Linear Capital has made early-stage investments in over 120 startup teams including Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, and Agile Robots. The combined valuation of Linear's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier Data Intelligence Technology Fund, and in the long term, to gradually build itself into the most influential Frontier Technology Application Fund.