Consensus, an AI-based search engine for scientific research, announced that it raised $11.5 million in new Series A funding. This funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, whose previous Series A investments include Twitter, Coinbase, and MongoDB. USV is joined by other investors, including 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 a tedious and time-consuming part of a researcher’s process. It is out-of-reach for any non-academic looking for more objective content. Even though new AI chatbots and innovative search engines continue to emerge daily, these new products are focused on broad, general-purpose search. They 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 an utterly antiquated user experience.
Consensus aims to change this equation and make scientific research, humanity’s most valuable source of knowledge, discoverable, accessible, and consumable. To accomplish this, Consensus is building an AI-based search engine designed specifically for scientific research papers.
Since launching an AI search engine in the winter of 2022, Consensus has grown to 400,000+ monthly active users and nearly $2 million in annualized revenue, growing the latter by over 600% in 2024 alone. Consensus users come primarily from academia, healthcare, and the biosciences. But the product also reaches wider audiences, including finance, journalism, and even everyday consumers, who often look for personal health information.
Consensus will use these new funds to grow its team, accelerate product development, and invest in different growth experiments. Its vision is to own the research slice of the future of information discovery on the Internet.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are consumer technologists who are the children of academics, teachers, and researchers. 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.”
- Consensus CEO Eric Olson of himself and his Co-founder Christian Salem
“I had been following the advancements of AI and became convinced of its power and utility after playing with GPT-3 in 2020. 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.”
• ⁃ CPO & co-founder Christan Salem
