Chuangcai Advanced Education raises $14.9M Series A

The company is better known as Deep Material, based in Tianjin and founded in 2021. Chinese outlets describe the round as a Series A+ of nearly ¥100M, not a plain Series A. Existing shareholder Source Code Capital and new investor Jinyu Maowu led it, and Yichen Capital and others followed. Proceeds go to the M-Loop intelligent system, scaling the M-Lab automated experiment platform, the M-Data dataset, a distributed lab network called OPL, and hiring. The company plans to make its high-throughput lab five times larger over the next two years. The company claims it has cut development and validation time for new metal alloys from 5 to 10 years down to 2 to 3 months, at roughly a tenth of the cost. It says M-Data holds more than 100,000 records, and that it has released nearly 20 materials, several of them in mass production. Partners named include a global consumer electronics maker, a fusion energy company, a commercial space company and a tire mold producer. These figures come from the company and have not been independently verified. For AI founders, the notable part is the data strategy. Deep Material trains on its own experimental results, including failed runs, produced by robotic labs it operates. That makes proprietary physical data the moat, and the capital cost of building those labs is the price of it.