London-based startup Apoha emerged from stealth with a $36 million Series A to scale proprietary hardware and AI models that analyze liquid wave patterns for drug and material discovery.
The digital frontier is expanding beyond code and silicon into the very molecular fabric of physical reality. Apoha, a deep-tech startup operating out of London and San Francisco, emerged from stealth on June 3, 2026, announcing a $36 million Series A funding round. Led by European venture firm Singular, the round includes participation from Draper Associates, Redalpine, Seedcamp, Wilbe, and Nucleus, alongside a grant from Innovate UK. This capital injection signals a shift in the AI arms race: the transition from training models on human-generated text to training them on the raw, sensory data of the physical world.
Apoha’s core innovation lies in its proprietary hardware, dubbed VIBE (Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation). The device analyzes pinhead-sized samples by suspending them in liquid and applying physical stressors. By recording the resulting wave patterns—a process the company calls “liquid intelligence”—Apoha generates over 1,000 numerical descriptors per sample in minutes. These “behavioral embeddings” provide a third data class for molecular science, moving beyond traditional structure and composition to map how materials actually behave. CEO Shamit Shrivastava, who pioneered these methods at Oxford, holds the patents for the liquid wave analysis and the specialized hardware required to capture this data.
This development arrives as the broader tech sector faces significant infrastructure and security hurdles. While Apoha scales its “wet lab” AI, industry giants are fortifying the hardware layer. On June 3, Infineon integrated its OPTIGA Trusted Platform Module with NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor to secure physical AI systems. Simultaneously, the energy demands of the AI boom are turning tech firms into energy speculators, with electricity becoming a scarce commodity as of late May 2026. For Apoha, the challenge will be scaling its hardware fleet amidst these tightening resource constraints and a volatile global economy currently threatened by oil shocks and military clashes in the Strait of Hormuz.
The commercial implications for the pharmaceutical and food sectors are immediate. Apoha reports a multi-year research partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim where its platform identified high-risk antibody candidates with greater than 90% precision using as little as 8 micrograms of material. In a separate benchmark of 236 antibodies, the platform outperformed 12 industry-standard tests. By predicting drug stability or the texture of plant-based proteins before clinical trials, the company aims to eliminate the massive financial waste inherent in traditional R&D. One early customer, a food company, used the technology to find a substitute for a vegan chicken component in just two weeks after a supplier collapse.
Beyond pharma, Apoha is working with German biotech Ethris to predict how lipid nanoparticles carrying mRNA will behave in animal models. The startup also services multiple Fortune 500 customers across the food, beverage, and materials sectors, having completed approximately 40 customer projects to date. This puts Apoha in direct competition with other materials-science AI firms like CuspAI, which raised over $100 million in 2025, and Orbital Materials, which focuses on generative AI for carbon-capture cells. Unlike purely software-based LLM plays, Apoha’s strategy requires a physical footprint of laboratory hardware to generate its proprietary data.
As AI continues to permeate the physical world, the sovereignty of data remains a central theme. While Google expands its surveillance-adjacent features—such as deepfake call detection for Android announced in its June feature drop—startups like Apoha are creating entirely new categories of proprietary data that bypass traditional digital footprints. The Series A funding will be used to scale Apoha’s 25-person team and expand its platform to handle more sample types. This represents a new generation of scientific companies where AI is treated not as a future promise, but as a practical tool for re-engineering the physical world.
Lisa Grant serves as a Staff Writer for Just Right News, where she spearheads the publication’s coverage of Technology, Data Capitalism, and Surveillance. With a focus on the encroaching influence of Big Tech on the American way of life, Grant brings a critical, liberty-minded perspective to the most complex digital issues of the modern era. Her reporting is defined by a deep-seated skepticism of centralized power and a commitment to protecting the privacy and autonomy of the individual against the rising tide of what she calls the “Algorithmic State.”
Grant’s unique insight into the tech industry is rooted in her upbringing in Palo Alto, California. Growing up in the epicenter of Silicon Valley, she witnessed firsthand the transformation of the technology sector from a hub of scrappy, freedom-loving innovators into a landscape dominated by monolithic corporations. This proximity to the birth of the digital revolution provided her with an insider’s understanding of the culture and motivations driving the industry. For Grant, the shift toward data capitalism—where personal information is harvested as a primary commodity—is not just a market evolution, but a fundamental challenge to traditional American values of property rights and personal privacy. She saw the “garage startup” ethos replaced by a culture of data-mining and social engineering, a transition that informs her vigilant reporting today.
Now based in Seattle, Washington, Grant operates from another of the nation’s primary technological frontiers. Her location in the Pacific Northwest allows her to observe the real-world consequences of the tech industry’s expansion, from the implementation of invasive surveillance technologies in urban centers to the growing partnership between corporate entities and municipal governance. By reporting from the ground in Seattle, she bridges the gap between the abstract world of coding and the tangible impact it has on citizens’ daily lives, often highlighting how local policies serve as a testing ground for broader national surveillance initiatives.
At the heart of her work for Just Right News is her acclaimed feature series, “The Algorithmic State.” Through this series, Grant explores the ways in which automated systems and artificial intelligence are increasingly used to bypass traditional legislative processes and social norms. She argues that the reliance on opaque algorithms to manage society threatens to erode the transparency and accountability essential to a free republic. Her work meticulously documents how data-driven governance can lead to a “soft” surveillance state that penalizes traditional viewpoints and rewards digital conformity.
Grant’s reporting is a vital resource for readers who are wary of the “nanny state” and the unchecked power of digital gatekeepers. She views the defense of the digital frontier as the next great battle for constitutional conservatives. By exposing the mechanisms of data capitalism and the quiet expansion of surveillance networks, she empowers her audience to reclaim their digital sovereignty. In an era where information is often weaponized by those in power, Lisa Grant remains a steadfast advocate for the truth, ensuring that the principles of liberty and individual agency are not lost in the transition to an increasingly digital world.