Apoha, a frontier-tech startup that measures how molecules and materials behave under real-world conditions, has raised £27 million in funding led by Singular, with participation from Draper Associates, Redalpine, Seedcamp, Wilbe, Nucleus, and grant funding from Innovate UK. The funds will be used to build Liquid State Intelligence into the foundational data class of molecular behaviour, used across biologics, food, materials, and the next generation of physical-world AI.
For decades, scientists could determine what a molecule was from its sequence and what it looked like from its structure, but not how it actually behaved under real-world conditions. The only available measurements were narrow, conducted under specific lab conditions, leaving companies making billion-dollar decisions with significant uncertainty. Drugs move into clinical trials without fully knowing how they will work in patients. Food products launch with limited understanding of how target customers will perceive them. New materials enter the real world without a full picture of how they will perform under everyday conditions. As artificial intelligence moves beyond language and code into systems that act on the physical world, a parallel gap has emerged: machines have learned to see and to read, but have not learned to feel matter - to perceive how a drug responds to real-world conditions, how a flavour is perceived, or how a material functions under everyday use.
Apoha calls its answer to this gap Liquid State Intelligence - a new category of molecular science alongside sequence and structure. Its first product is VIBE (Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation), the empirical readout of how a molecule, material, or formulation behaves under real-world conditions. To generate it, Apoha's platform takes a sample small enough to fit on the head of a pin, suspends it in liquid, applies a controlled series of stresses, and captures the wave patterns the molecule generates in response. Those wave patterns become more than 1,000 empirically measured descriptors of behaviour - a single VIBE readout resolving simultaneously what conventional approaches measure one property at a time. Within minutes, a VIBE readout can indicate whether an experimental drug will fail before it ever reaches a clinical trial.
The platform is already in commercial use. Joint research with Boehringer Ingelheim, a multi-year commercial partner, has demonstrated Apoha identifying high-risk antibody candidates with greater than 90% precision from as little as 8 micrograms of material. In a separate benchmarking exercise on a 236 clinical antibodies dataset, Apoha's platform outperformed 12 industry-standard tests that pharma companies currently rely on, flagging late-stage failure and demonstrating orthogonal information to what conventional measurements capture. A second paper, published in May 2026, decoded the precise physical mechanism behind the VIBE measurement. For Ethris, the German biotech, Apoha is working on improving in-vitro to in-vivo correlation as a way of predicting how lipid nanoparticles carrying mRNA will behave in animals. THIS, the plant-based food company, used Apoha's technology to find a replacement for protein in a product destined for supermarket shelves. Apoha also partners with Somru BioSciences and multiple Fortune 500 companies across pharma, food and beverage, and materials sectors.
Founded in 2021 by Shamit Shrivastava and Anshika Srivastava, Apoha traces its science to 2008, when Shrivastava began researching what happens at the boundary where matter meets liquids - a problem left unresolved by the Nobel Prize-winning Hodgkin-Huxley model of nerve signal transmission. His discovery that those boundaries carry a measurable record of how molecules interact, respond to stress and change over time was named one of Scientific American's "13 Discoveries That Could Change Everything" in 2018 and has since been cited more than 1,500 times across 19 papers. Before co-founding Apoha, Srivastava served as Executive Director at Goldman Sachs. The company holds more than 60 patents covering hardware, software, data and AI models, and owns the entire stack end to end, with operations in San Francisco and London.
Liquid State Intelligence took 15 years of science and 5 years of company-building to bring to life. There is no shortcut to this data class - it cannot be scraped from the internet, synthesised, or retrofitted from existing assays. It has to be measured. Where sequence gave us the language of biology and structure the language of design, Liquid State Intelligence gives us the language of behaviour - what matter, molecules and materials actually do - and we are the company building it.
Machines have learned to see what matter looks like and to read what we say about it. They have not learned to taste, smell or feel matter - to perceive how a drug dissolves, how a flavour holds, how a material wears. That is the layer we are building. Liquid State Intelligence will be to physical-world AI what sequence was to genomics, the data without which nothing else works.
Apoha represents a new generation of European scientific companies where AI is not a future promise, but a practical tool already transforming how biology is done. What excited us immediately was the team's ability to turn world-class research into a product that pharma companies can use today to dramatically accelerate R&D. For the first time in 25 years, we are back to creating genuinely new science, being commercialised by founders with drive and global ambition.
