materials-discovery
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Haojun Jia
Haojun Jia is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Principle, an AI-for-science startup building AI scientists that discover new materials and chemical reactions. He hatched the idea while finishing a physical chemistry PhD at MIT, where his research paired high-throughput quantum chemistry with machine learning to design catalysts. Deep Principle's platform - marketed as ReactiveAI and now the agentic tool Agent Mira - fuses deep learning with first-principles physics to compress the time and cost of materials R&D. The company has raised roughly $28 million across two rounds from investors including GL Ventures, Linear Capital, Vertex Ventures, and funds backed by Lenovo and Baidu. Jia was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list in Healthcare & Science.
Malur Narayan
Malur Narayan is the CEO and co-founder of XTRIUM, an Austin-based B2B AI startup building an intelligence layer for materials that matches materials to real-world applications, surfaces sourcing risk, and turns supply chains from fragile to resilient. A computer engineer who was running machine-learning research and self-managed software teams in the early 1990s, he spent three decades scaling technology businesses across five continents at Nortel and Tata Consultancy Services before co-founding two AI startups. He frames XTRIUM around a single idea: making the search for a new application for any material as fast and easy as an internet search, compressing what used to take a year into days.
Deep Principle
Deep Principle is an AI-for-Science company spun out of MIT that builds ReactiveAI, a closed-loop R&D platform fusing generative AI, quantum chemistry, and high-throughput experimentation to discover new materials, catalysts, and chemical processes far faster and cheaper than traditional trial-and-error labs. Founded by MIT PhDs Haojun Jia and Chenru Duan, the company targets materials, energy, and pharmaceutical R&D and has reported quantum-chemistry speedups on the order of 20,000x versus conventional DFT.
Neiman Mathew
Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.
Hermann Tribukait
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.