Apoha Emerges from Stealth with $36M to Build Liquid State Intelligence - Teaching Machines to Feel, Taste, Smell, and Understand How Matter Behaves

Apoha, the frontier-tech company pioneering Liquid State Intelligence, a new data layer that reveals how matter, formulations, and materials behave, led by Shamit Shrivastava and Anshika Srivastava, emerges from stealth today with $36M in funding, 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.

Expanding Liquid State Intelligence Across Industries.

The funding will support the development of Liquid State Intelligence as a foundational data layer for understanding molecular behavior. The company aims to apply this capability across multiple industries, including biologics, food, advanced materials, and emerging physical-world AI systems.

By creating a deeper understanding of how molecules behave in real-world environments, the platform seeks to accelerate discovery, design, and optimization processes across sectors where molecular interactions determine performance, functionality, and outcomes.

Filling a Critical Gap in Molecular Science.

While scientists can identify a molecule’s sequence and structure, they often lack data on how it behaves in real-world conditions. This creates uncertainty in areas such as drug development, food innovation, and materials design.

Apoha is building Liquid State Intelligence, a new data layer focused on molecular behavior. By generating large-scale datasets on how matter responds in real-world environments, the company aims to improve discovery, prediction, and decision-making across biologics, food, materials, and future physical-world AI systems.

From Scientific Discovery to a Scalable Platform.

Apoha’s origins trace back to research begun in 2008 by founder and CEO Shamit Shrivastava, who discovered a new way to measure how molecules interact and behave at the interface between matter and liquids. The breakthrough was recognized by Scientific American in 2018 and has since gained significant academic attention.

In 2021, Shamit Shrivastava and co-founder Anshika Srivastava launched Apoha to commercialize the technology, building a platform for measuring molecular behavior at scale. Today, the company has developed an extensive portfolio of patents spanning hardware, software, data infrastructure, and AI, forming the foundation of its Liquid State Intelligence platform.

Turning Molecular Behavior Into Actionable Data.

Apoha’s first product, VIBE® (Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation), is designed to measure how molecules behave under real-world conditions. By analyzing how tiny samples respond to controlled stresses in a liquid environment, the platform generates more than 1,000 behavioral descriptors from a single measurement, creating a detailed molecular fingerprint in minutes.

The technology is intended to help companies predict the performance of drugs, food products, and materials earlier in the development process, reducing costly trial-and-error. Apoha says the platform is already being used commercially, with research conducted alongside Boehringer Ingelheim demonstrating the ability to identify high-risk antibody candidates with more than 90% precision using extremely small sample volumes.

Early Validation Across Pharma, Food, and Materials.

Apoha’s platform has demonstrated strong performance across multiple industries. In a benchmark involving 236 clinical antibody candidates, the company says VIBE outperformed 12 industry-standard tests and provided unique insights that conventional measurements failed to capture. A recent scientific publication further validated the physical mechanism underlying the technology.

The platform is already being used by organizations including Ethris, which is exploring its ability to predict how mRNA delivery systems behave in living organisms, and THIS, which used the technology to rapidly identify ingredient alternatives for commercial products. Apoha also works with Somru BioSciences and several Fortune 500 companies across pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, and advanced materials.

Building a New Data Layer for Molecular Behavior.

According to Shamit Shrivastava, Liquid State Intelligence represents a fundamentally new class of scientific data focused on how molecules and materials behave in real-world conditions. He argues that, unlike existing datasets, this information must be directly measured and could become as important to understanding behavior as sequence and structure are to biology and molecular design.

Anshika Srivastava described Liquid State Intelligence as a missing layer for physical-world AI, enabling machines to understand how matter behaves rather than simply what it looks like or how it is described. The company believes this behavioral data will be foundational for future advances in medicine, food science, and materials engineering.

Investors also see broad commercial potential. According to Raffi Kamber, Apoha has successfully translated a novel scientific breakthrough into a platform that can already help companies accelerate research and development, combining frontier science with practical industry applications.