Apoha Emerges From Stealth With $36 Million to Teach AI How Matter Behaves

--- headline: "Apoha Emerges From Stealth With $36 Million to Teach AI How Matter Behaves" slug: apoha-36m-liquid-intelligence-stealth category: business story_number: 4 date: 2026-06-04 ---

# Apoha Emerges From Stealth With $36 Million to Teach AI How Matter Behaves

A London deep-tech startup built on 15 years of interfacial physics wants to give artificial intelligence a sense of touch, taste, and smell -- and it just landed the funding to try.

Artificial intelligence can read a genome, fold a protein, and write a medical paper. What it cannot do is feel how a drug dissolves in the bloodstream, sense whether a plant-based chicken nugget will shred like real meat on the tongue, or predict how a new coating will wear under stress. That blind spot -- the absence of structured data about how matter actually behaves in the messy conditions of the real world -- is where Apoha believes it has found a billion-dollar gap.

The London and San Francisco-based startup emerged from stealth on June 3 with $36 million in total funding, announced at the Frontier Technologies Stage at SXSW London. The round was led by European venture capital firm 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 company did not disclose its valuation.

The Science of Feeling

Apoha's origin story traces back to 2008, when CEO Shamit Shrivastava -- a biophysicist and mechanical engineer who completed his PhD at Boston University and postdoctoral research at Oxford -- began investigating a problem left open by the Nobel Prize-winning Hodgkin-Huxley model of nerve signaling: the physics of what happens at the boundary where matter meets liquid. His 2014 discovery of two-dimensional solitary sound waves at a lipid interface was later named among Scientific American's breakthroughs that could change everything.

In 2021, Shrivastava co-founded Apoha with Anshika Srivastava, the company's chief operating officer and a former executive director at Goldman Sachs. The name comes from a Sanskrit word meaning "negation or exclusion," drawn from Buddhist philosophy that things are defined by what they are not more than by what they are.

The company now holds more than 60 patents across hardware, software, data, and AI models, and employs 29 people.

How VIBE Works

Apoha's first commercial product is called VIBE -- Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation. The platform takes a sample of material small enough to sit on the head of a pin, suspends it in liquid, applies a controlled sequence of tiny physical stresses, and records the wave patterns the molecule generates in response. Those patterns resolve into more than 1,000 measured behavioral descriptors in a single reading that takes minutes, where conventional assays capture one property at a time over days or weeks.

The company calls this data layer "Liquid State Intelligence" -- a new category it places alongside sequence and structure. Where genomics digitized the language of biology and structural biology digitized design, Apoha wants to digitize behavior.

"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," Shrivastava said.

Early Traction and Hard Numbers

The platform is already in commercial use, with roughly 40 customer projects completed to date. The firmest evidence comes from a multi-year research partnership with German pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim: in a joint preprint, Apoha identified high-risk antibody candidates with greater than 90 percent precision from as little as 8 micrograms of material. A second benchmark across 236 clinical antibodies showed the platform outperforming 12 industry-standard developability tests that pharma firms currently rely on to predict drug failure -- and surfacing information those conventional measures miss entirely.

Beyond pharma, Apoha is working with German biotech Ethris on predicting how lipid nanoparticles carrying mRNA behave in animals, with plant-based food company THIS on a protein replacement bound for supermarket shelves, and with Somru BioSciences and multiple Fortune 500 companies across pharma, food, and materials.

Co-founder Srivastava framed the ambition in sensory terms: "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. That is the layer we are building."

The Investor Thesis

Singular, which has previously backed Aikido, Basecamp Research, and Vibe, leads as a first-time investor. Raffi Kamber, co-founder and general partner 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."

Draper Associates, known for early bets on Tesla, Skype, and Coinbase, joins as a new backer. The global biophysical assays market stands at $3.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $7.9 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5 percent, according to Dataintelo.

What Comes Next

The funding will go toward scaling Apoha's hardware and AI platform to handle more sample types and more customers. The broader bet is that as physical-world AI systems -- from autonomous labs to robotics -- move from manipulating digital tokens to acting on real matter, they will need exactly the kind of behavioral data Apoha produces.

As Shrivastava told The Next Web: "It cannot be scraped from the internet, synthesised, or retrofitted from existing assays. It has to be measured."

Whether enough buyers agree to make a data class out of molecular behavior is the question the next round will have to answer. But with 60-plus patents, a hardware moat, and paying customers across pharma, food, and materials, Apoha has assembled a rare combination of deep science and commercial traction that most stealth exits can only claim on a pitch deck.