The deeptech company claims its platform can measure how molecules behave in real-world conditions — helping pharma, food and materials companies predict failures before products reach market.
Apoha, a deeptech company pioneering what it calls Liquid State Intelligence emerges from stealth today with $36 million in funding. The round is led by Singular, with participation from Tim Draper’s Draper Associates and continued backing from seed investors Redalpine, Seedcamp, Wilbe and Nucleus, alongside grant funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s national innovation agency.
For decades, scientists did not have enough evidence to answer the most fundamental questions of molecular science. They 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 clues they had were limited and narrow measurements under specific lab conditions. Because this information is missing, companies make billion-dollar decisions everyday with a lot of uncertainty. Drugs enter clinical trials without fully understanding how they will work in patients. Food products are launched with limited understanding of how the target customer will perceive them. New materials are used in the real world without fully understanding how they will perform under everyday conditions.
As the frontier of artificial intelligence moves beyond language and code into systems that act on the physical world, another gap is emerging.
While machines have learned to see and to read, they have not learned to feel matter: to perceive how a drug responds to real-world conditions, how a flavour is perceived, how a material functions in real-world conditions. Vision and language have been digitised at scale, but the behaviour of matter has not.
Enter Liquid State Intelligence
Apoha creates that missing data layer for physical-world AI: large-scale empirical data about how matter behaves, enabling more powerful reasoning, prediction, and facilitating autonomous scientific discovery. Apoha calls this layer Liquid State Intelligence: a new category of molecular science alongside sequence and structure. In building the foundational data class of molecular behaviour, Apoha is rewriting how the world discovers and designs medicines, food and materials.
The science behind Apoha traces back to 2008, when founder and CEO Shamit Shrivastava began researching a problem the Nobel Prize-winning Hodgkin-Huxley model of nerve signal transmission had left unresolved: the physics of what happens at the boundary where matter meets liquids. Shrivastava discovered that those boundaries carry a measurable record of how molecules interact, respond to stress and change over time.
His discovery 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.
In 2021, Shrivastava co-founded Apoha with Anshika Srivastava, Apoha’s COO and former Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, to turn his research into the world’s first platform for measuring molecular behaviour at scale.
Today, the company holds more than 60 patents covering hardware, software, data and AI models.
Turning molecular behaviour into readable data
Apoha’s 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 so small it would 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.
Recorded in real time, 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 tell whether an experimental drug will fail before it ever reaches a clinical trial, saving years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars per failed candidate. The same readout works across food, materials, and any domain where how matter behaves determines whether a product succeeds.
Early commercial validation
The platform is already in commercial use. Joint research with Boehringer Ingelheim, a multi-year commercial partner, has shown Apoha identifying high-risk antibody candidates with greater than 90% precision from as little as 8 micrograms of material.
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 the supermarket shelves in record time.
The company also partners with Somru BioSciences and multiple Fortune 500 companies across pharma, food and beverage, and materials sectors.
Shamit Shrivastava, CEO and co-founder at Apoha, said:
“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.”
Raffi Kamber, Co-Founder and GP at Singular said:
“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.
For the first time in 25 years, we are back to creating genuinely new science, being commercialised by founders with drive and global ambition.”
The funding 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.