The materials scientist's dilemma hasn't changed much in a generation. You screen a few promising molecules in the lab, wait three weeks for results, and discover your candidate either can't carry a charge or costs more to synthesize than the final product is worth. Start over.
Apoello, a fresh spin-out from the University of Liverpool, thinks it's found a way out. The company announced a £470,000 pre-seed round last month—February 17, to be exact—to commercialize DiaDEM, a digital platform that promises to collapse that grinding cycle into a matter of days. Users search millions of compounds by the exact properties they need, trigger on-demand simulations, and order samples straight from the screen. No lab coat required until the molecules arrive.
SFC Capital and the British Business Bank's Regional Angels Programme led the investment. The university itself chipped in £150,000, a vote of confidence that speaks to the platform's origins in Liverpool's Materials Innovation Factory.
DiaDEM—shorthand for Digital Discovery Platform for Organic Electronics—isn't exactly reinventing materials science. But it is bundling a lot of steps that typically live in different corners of the research process. At its core sits a database of commercially available molecules and synthesizable variants, each pre-tagged with computed properties: HOMO/LUMO energy levels, excitation energies, solubility. Toxicity flags, even patent status.
The interface lets researchers skip the usual brute-force browsing. Need an electron acceptor for organic photovoltaics with a particular bandgap? Query the physics. Looking for an OLED host material with precise triplet energies? Same drill. The platform claims to cover more than 50 million compounds across organic electronics domains—displays, solar cells, transistors, sensors.
Where things get more specialized: an on-demand calculation layer. Users can trigger multiscale simulations—charge-carrier mobility predictions, crystal structure modeling—without maintaining their own high-performance computing cluster or waiting in queue at a shared facility. The mobility workflow, for instance, runs through molecule parametrization, morphology deposition, and disorder modeling to spit out transport properties. All orchestrated in the background via SimStack tools from Nanomatch, a German partner.
Then the procurement angle. Once a candidate clears digital screening, DiaDEM links directly to Mcule, a Hungarian chemical supplier, to order samples. The pitch is velocity—property search to lab bench without switching platforms or haggling over custom synthesis quotes.
Whether that integration actually saves meaningful time, or just a few clicks, remains to be seen.
From Brussels Funding to British Spinoff
DiaDEM didn't emerge from thin air. It started as an EIC Transition-funded project—Grant 101057564, if you're keeping score—backed by €1.294 million from the European Union. The money ran from May 2022 through April 2025 and paired Liverpool's Materials Innovation Factory with Nanomatch and Mcule.
Prof. Alessandro Troisi, who holds the Chair in Theory & Simulation of Materials at Liverpool and has published extensively on high-throughput virtual screening for organic electronics, co-founded Apoello with Dr. Ömer Hasan Omar. The company incorporated on March 24, 2025. Omar now runs the operation as CEO.
The university announced the spin-out publicly the following month. The fresh capital will fund team expansion, platform development, and outreach to the industrial users Apoello needs to court—display manufacturers, solar cell developers, sensor companies with deep pockets and tight deadlines.
Beta Testers and Competition Questions
DiaDEM launched a beta program in mid-2024, handing out free credits for calculations and procurement to academics and industry testers. The platform made its public debut at SID Display Week in May 2024 and turned up as a start-up competition finalist at LOPEC 2025 in Munich. Documentation describes a credit-based access model. No public pricing yet, though.
Apoello positions DiaDEM as unique in the organic electronics niche, arguing no comparable solution bundles property search, advanced computation, and integrated procurement under one roof.
That's... partially true. Schrödinger's LiveDesign for Organic Electronics and Citrine Informatics both offer cloud-based design and AI-driven workflows, but neither advertises direct chemical ordering within the platform. Whether that gap is meaningful—or just a feature request away from closing—is an open question.
For now, Apoello is leaning into case studies. Screening 200 singlet fission candidates. Identifying patent-friendly alternatives to leading electron acceptors. Computing giant surface potentials for transport layer materials. The usual proof points for a platform trying to establish credibility before the first renewal notices come due.
The underlying bet is straightforward enough. If you can genuinely compress a three-month discovery cycle into three days, labs will pay for the shortcut. The trick is proving it's not just faster, but materially better—and that the molecules DiaDEM surfaces don't just look good on a screen.
That's the part where the lab coat comes back on.
