Apoha: unlocking the missing data class of molecular science

a gap at the heart of molecular science

For decades, molecular science has operated with two fundamental data classes. Sequences tell us what a molecule is. Structures show us what a molecule looks like. These two layers have driven enormous progress, from genomics to structural biology, and underpinned much of modern drug discovery and materials design.

But there is a third layer that has remained largely elusive: States. How a molecule or material actually behaves under real-world conditions. Whether a drug candidate will survive development. Whether a formulation will hold together. Whether a material will perform as intended. This is where the physical world makes its decisions, and until now, science has had no reliable way to see it.

The consequences are significant. Across pharma, food and beverage, and materials science, critical development decisions are made without a complete picture of how a system will actually perform. The result is costly late-stage failures, slow iteration cycles, and enormous amounts of time and capital spent testing candidates that were always destined to fail. Apoha was founded to close that gap.

our investment

redalpine has backed Apoha since the seed round in 2023. We backed the team early because the science was real and the founders saw something the market had not yet named. Apoha's $36 million Series A was led by Singular, with Draper Associates joining the round. We are proud to have continued our support alongside Seedcamp, Wilbe, Nucleus Capital, Acequia Capital, Plug and Play, R7, and Innovate UK.

What drew us in early, and keeps us convinced, is the combination of genuinely novel science with a founding team that understands both the depth of the problem and the commercial path through it. The platform is already in production with leading pharma and food and beverage companies, the dataset is growing with every measurement, and the underlying IP is defensible in a way that is rare at this stage. This is the kind of company that looks obvious in hindsight. We are glad we saw it early.

liquid state intelligence

Apoha has invented the world's first technology platform to resolve States as a data class, what the company calls Liquid State Intelligence. The underlying insight is that everywhere in nature, when molecules meet the liquids around them, behaviour is determined at the interface between them. Conventional tools measure molecules in isolation, one property at a time. Apoha's platform uses interfacial thermodynamics directly as its physical substrate, tapping into the processes nature is already running.

In practice, a tiny amount of sample, as little as 8 micrograms, is introduced onto a specially engineered liquid surface. The interaction generates wave patterns captured in real time, encoding how the material truly behaves as a complete system. Apoha calls this readout a VIBE check: Variations in Inter-facial Behaviour Under Excitation. A single VIBE check resolves what would otherwise require an entire panel of conventional tests, capturing hydrophobicity, aggregation, viscosity, and more simultaneously. Over time, Apoha's AI models learn the relationship between molecular identity and behaviour. Given a candidate or formulation, the platform can predict real-world performance earlier than any existing tool, flagging risk and narrowing the field faster than months of empirical iteration would allow. And with every measurement, the dataset grows more predictive, more powerful, and more valuable. 

already proven in industry

Apoha is not a science project. The platform is already in commercial use with leading enterprises across pharma and food and beverage. Joint research with Boehringer Ingelheim has demonstrated Apoha identifying high-risk antibody candidates with greater than 90% precision. In a separate benchmarking exercise across 236 clinical antibodies, the platform outperformed 12 industry-standard tests that pharma companies currently rely on. Twinings is among the company's food and beverage partners.

The platform sits on over 60 patents spanning hardware, software, data, and AI models. The science was invented by Apoha's founder, Shamit Shrivastava, built on over a decade of Nobel Prize-rooted foundational research. It was not licensed or acquired. No competitor can fast-follow it.

the founding team

Apoha was founded by Shamit Shrivastava and Anshika Srivastava. Shrivastava invented the underlying science and has spent over a decade building the foundational research that makes Liquid State Intelligence possible. Anshika Srivastava, co-founder and COO, brings the operational and commercial rigour to scale it: previously an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, where she spent nine years in London, she now leads the platform's expansion across pharma, food and beverage, and beyond. The broader team spans physics, biology, data science, and engineering, because this problem demands all of them.

whats next for apoha

The near-term commercial case is already proven. The longer-term vision is something much larger. Apoha transforms the foundational data layer for physical AI, giving machines structured, empirically validated data about how matter actually behaves for the first time. The market is every industry that depends on matter performing as expected. Which is every industry.

Michael and Philip have worked closely with the founders from the beginning, including by supporting them in identifying which industries and problems to focus on first.