Chenru Duan
Researcher · Founder
Now Founder, Deep Principle
Latest on AI4S.fyiFunding · Jul 14 · founderDeep Principle · Series A3 · undisclosedAccount linked from hjkgrp.mit.edu · Avatar from their X account, taken 2026-09-28
Affiliations
Current
- Founder · Deep Principle
Also named in the companies' announcements: Microsoft, MIT
Current roles come from these dated records, not from the bio below. Each links the page it was read from.
About
Chenru Duan is a founder and CTO of Deep Principle, where he leads work on generative AI for chemical design. He earned his chemistry PhD at MIT in Heather Kulik's group in 2022, using machine learning to design inorganic catalysts, and was a research scientist at Microsoft Azure Quantum. He holds a bachelor's in physics from Zhejiang University.
Read on 2026-09-29; for current roles see Affiliations above. Read at: deepprinciple.com ↗ · hjkgrp.mit.edu ↗
Selected work
- Optimal transport for generating transition states in chemical reactions ↗
React-OT, which generates the transition states of chemical reactions with optimal transport.
Also on this record: Haojun Jia
Each byline was read on the paper itself. Only people on this record are named, not the full author list, and a shared byline does not say who did which part.
Founded
Deep PrincipleMaterials and chemistry · 2024 · 7 rounds on record · Series A3 undisclosedBackground: MIT PhD; research scientist at Microsoft (Azure Quantum) (as the company's own announcements put it)
Co-founders: Haojun Jia
Backed byFortera CapitalJinma InvestmentAlibaba Entrepreneurs Fund Greater Bay Area fund (managed by Gobi Partners)Ant GroupVertex Ventures ChinaGL Ventures
On the timeline
- 2025-12-25SAGA, an agent that rewrites its own design goals, gets one E. coli hit from 28 tested molecules and three PD-L1 nanobody binders from 24
- 2025-12-17SDE, a 1,125-question discovery benchmark from Deep Principle and 25 institutions: the best models score 0.60-0.75, against 0.86 on GPQA-Diamond
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