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.
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, [email protected], https://consensus.app/
SOURCE Consensus
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