Consensus, an AI-enabled scholarly search engine for scientific research, has raised $11.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures.
Perplexity’s lead investors Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman participated in the round, along with former seed investor Kevin Carter, Draper Associates, Alumni Ventures and Path Ventures.
What it does
The company builds an AI-powered search engine to make scientific research papers discoverable, usable, and accessible.
Users provide the AI with a prompt question and receive literature with answers relevant to that question, and it also synthesizes insights across the literature and extracts information relevant to the specific studies found, such as sample sizes and populations.
Boston-based Consensus plans to use the funding to expand headcount, invest in growth experiments and accelerate product development.
“We value research and evidence deeply, but we didn’t have the skills or focus to vet the research ourselves. We wanted to apply our consumer tech background to scientific research to make this great content more accessible and consumable to people of all backgrounds,” Consensus CEO Eric Olson said in a statement.
Market Snapshot
Other companies using AI to sift through scientific research include Dimensions, which offers linked research data and AI applications aimed at accelerating research discovery.
Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-enabled research tools for scientific literature that aim to help researchers extract meaning from papers and identify connections between them.
