Apoha

Apoha is a London deep-tech company that raised £26.7m ($36m) on 3 June 2026, led by Singular with Seedcamp, Draper Associates and Redalpine following, alongside an Innovate UK grant. The company is building what it calls "liquid state intelligence": a layer of empirical molecular-behaviour data collected from laboratory experiments that cannot be reproduced by scraping internet text. This data is intended to underpin AI systems that need to reason about the physical world accurately, rather than rely on statistical patterns from digitised human knowledge.

The core thesis is that current large language models and physical-world AI systems (including robotics, materials Science and drug discovery) are limited by the absence of reliable, empirically derived molecular data. Apoha's approach is to instrument laboratory environments and capture measured behaviour of matter at the molecular scale, building a proprietary corpus that is structurally different from anything a web scrape can produce. The Innovate UK grant alongside the equity round signals that the UK Government recognises the strategic importance of physical-world AI data infrastructure.

Apoha occupies an unusual position in the AI landscape: not a model company, not an application company, but a data-infrastructure layer for physical-world AI. If the thesis holds, the value capture model resembles that of proprietary scientific databases, with high switching costs once researchers and model trainers depend on the data. The involvement of Draper Associates, a US-originated firm with a long track record in deep Science, alongside European-first investors Seedcamp and Redalpine, gives the round a transatlantic character that reflects the cross-border appeal of the company's unusual data layer.