AI startup Apoha raises $36 million to reinvent materials discovery

Apoha, a London- and San Francisco-based deep-tech startup, has emerged from stealth with $36 million in funding to develop artificial intelligence models capable of creating and improving materials ranging from pharmaceuticals and proteins to food products and industrial coatings. The company’s approach is based on a new type of scientific data that captures how materials behave when exposed to physical forces in liquid environments.

According to Fortune, the funding includes the startup’s 2024 seed round and a subsequent financing round completed this year. The investment was led by Singular, with participation from Draper Associates, Redalpine, Seedcamp, Wilbe and Nucleus. Apoha also received support from Innovate UK.

The company was founded by Anshika Srivastava and Shamit Shrivastava, who believe that the next breakthrough in materials science will come from teaching AI systems to understand not only what materials look like, but how they behave.

“Machines have learned to see what matter looks like and to read what we say about it,” Anshika Srivastava said, according to Fortune. “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.”

At the core of Apoha’s technology is a proprietary system called VIBE (Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation). The platform analyzes tiny samples of materials suspended in liquid and subjected to controlled physical stress. The resulting wave patterns generate more than 1,000 data points describing how the material behaves.

The company transforms this information into what it calls a behavioral embedding, a digital fingerprint that can be used to train AI models. Apoha refers to this approach as “liquid intelligence.”

According to Fortune, the startup believes this data can help predict critical properties such as taste, texture, stability, durability and chemical reactivity. The goal is to dramatically accelerate product development while reducing research costs.

One of Apoha’s earliest commercial successes came from helping a food company rapidly identify a replacement ingredient for a plant-based chicken product after a supplier unexpectedly exited the market.

The pharmaceutical industry is another major target. According to Fortune, Apoha has established a multi-year collaboration with German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The company claims its platform can identify high-risk antibody candidates with more than 90% precision using only microscopic quantities of material.

Apoha also works with biotech firm Ethris to evaluate lipid nanoparticles used in mRNA-based therapies and vaccines. Beyond healthcare, the startup is collaborating with customers in the food, beverage and advanced materials sectors.

The company has completed approximately 40 commercial projects and currently employs around 25 people. The newly raised capital will be used to expand both its laboratory infrastructure and its AI platform, enabling the analysis of a broader range of materials and supporting a larger customer base.

According to Fortune, Apoha’s founders believe that combining proprietary hardware, unique scientific datasets and artificial intelligence could fundamentally change how industries discover and develop new materials.

As demand grows for faster innovation in pharmaceuticals, sustainable food production and advanced manufacturing, Apoha is positioning itself at the intersection of AI, materials science and industrial research, a sector increasingly attracting investor attention worldwide.