Celebrated VC Firm Union Square Ventures leads a Series A round
along with Perplexity lead investors Nat
Friedman and Daniel Gross in
support of the AI Search Engine for Scientific Literature
BOSTON, Aug. 14,
2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Consensus.app, an
AI-powered search engine for scientific research, announced today
that it raised $11.5 million in new
Series A funding.
"At Consensus, we aim to create a world
where expert knowledge is within reach of everyone. A world where
scientists can get back to doing real science, not searching, and
one where a new generation of citizen scientists can be created via
easier access to real research."
The investment round is led by Union Square Ventures, whose
previous Series A investments include Twitter,
Coinbase, and MongoDB. USV is joined by a group of
other investors including Perplexity lead investors Nat Friedman and Daniel
Gross, and previous Seed investors Draper Associates,
Kevin Carter, Path Ventures and
Alumni Ventures.
Searching for scientific literature on the internet is broken.
It is a tedious and time-consuming part of a researcher's process
and out-of-reach for any non-academic looking for more objective
content.
While new AI chatbots and innovative search engines continue to
emerge daily, these new products are focused on broad,
general-purpose search and are not built to conduct real, rigorous
research. At the same time, the tools still used today to engage
with scientific research offer zero intelligence and a completely
antiquated user experience.
Consensus aims to change this equation and make humanity's most
valuable source of knowledge, scientific research, discoverable,
accessible and consumable. To accomplish this, Consensus is
building an AI-powered search engine designed specifically for
scientific research papers.
Since launching their AI search engine in the Winter of 2022,
Consensus has grown to over 400,000 monthly active users and nearly
$2M in annualized revenue, growing
the latter by over 600% in 2024 alone.
The users of Consensus come primarily from the likes of
academia, healthcare and the biosciences. However the product
reaches wider audiences as well including finance, journalism and
even everyday consumers often looking for personal health
information.
Users use Consensus today to supercharge their literature
reviews in their studies, find scientific citations for work
presentations and even to fact check their friends. Queries into
Consensus span from the academically-minded: "Review the literature
on the relationship between socioeconomic factors and healthcare
outcomes in America", to the simple and straightforward: "is the
HPV vaccine safe?"
The idea for Consensus came from the founders experiencing this
problem as consumers themselves: "We are consumer technologists who
are the children of academics, teachers, and researchers," said
Consensus CEO Eric Olson of himself
and his Co-founder Christian Salem.
"We deeply value research and evidence, but we've never had the
skills nor attention span to comb through the research ourselves.
We wanted to apply our backgrounds in consumer tech to scientific
research, and try to make this amazing content more accessible and
consumable, no matter your background."
Eric originally pitched the idea of building a science answer
engine to Christian nearly a decade ago during their time as
classmates at Northwestern University.
However, it was Christian who convinced Eric to drop everything two
and half years ago to chase their dream:
"I had been following the advancements of AI and became
convinced of its power and utility after playing with GPT-3 in
2020." said CPO & co-founder Christan
Salem. "Couple this with the backdrop of the pandemic and
the world clamoring for better access to scientific information - I
felt the 'why now' for Consensus was too strong to overlook".
Consensus will use these new funds to grow their team,
accelerate product development and invest in different growth
experiments. The vision of Consensus is to own the research slice
of the future of information discovery on the internet.
Media Contact
Eric Olson, Consensus, 1
9783037237, eric@consensus.app, https://consensus.app/
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SOURCE Consensus