Masters Student and CEO raises $5.5M in pre-seed round to solve energy bottlenecks
Oxford/San Francisco, May 14th, 2026 – Amphiform, a deep tech company building a new generation of nano-catalyst energy materials, has closed a $5.5M pre-seed round led by General Catalyst, co-led by Main Object and with Thomas Wolf, Charlie Songhurst and other angel investors participating.
Amphiform was founded by New College masters student Grisha Sheldunov in 2026 to address energy bottlenecks for data centres, space and defence.
Today’s fuel cells are heavy and underpowered. The chemistry that generates electricity happens only at a thin interface where catalyst, fuel, electrons and protons meet. Most of the “deep” expensive catalyst is never used. Sheldunov's Oxford-based startup is building a new kind of matter: hybrid materials, assembled atomic layer by atomic layer, that turn the whole volume into active surface designed to be as lightweight and powerful as physics allows. These atomically engineered fuel cells are 85% cheaper and 30x more power-dense, running on renewable liquid fuels.
“Energy is the bottleneck on every other ambition humanity has: to decarbonise, to compute, to explore,” said Grisha Sheldunov, Founder and CEO, Amphiform. “The era of intelligent machines, electrified industry and expansion of life beyond Earth needs an energy source that none of today’s technologies can deliver: clean, abundant, dense enough to fly and cheap
enough to scale."
“We believe the answer is not just a bigger version of what already exists - it’s going a level deeper and engineering entirely new materials. That’s what we’re building, atom by atom, with the most precise manufacturing tools humanity has invented.”
Amphiform’s technology addresses two of the biggest infrastructure challenges facing the West: the power demand of data centres and rebuilding an energy stack that today depends on China and a volatile oil market. Demand is most urgent in AI data centres, where build-out is outpacing grid expansion and alternatives. This is where Amphiform will deploy first.
“Amphiform is redefining the future of energy, one atom at a time. At Hugging Face, we have a front-row seat to the rising energy costs of AI models and robotics, and I’m excited to see such a talented team tackling this enormous challenge.” – Thomas Wolf, co-founder, Hugging Face.
Amphiform is currently building its research lab in Oxford, making it a founder-led company emerging from the Oxford ecosystem rather than a traditional spin-out.