Elicit's $22M Series A - Deploying AI to radically increase good reasoning in the world
The News
Elicit* is used by more than 400,000 researchers every month to analyze research papers, extract data, and synthesize their findings. With features like AI-enabled systematic reviews, research reports, quick summary, or the possibility to ask questions to papers, Elicit introduced research for the machine intelligence age. Even folks who are not researchers can leverage Elicit to speed up literature review, find papers, or learn about a new domain. A generous Basic Plan, which is free, gives users access to unlimited search across more than 125 million papers, unlimited summaries of 4 papers at once, unlimited chat with 4 papers at once, the possibility to extract data from 10 papers per month, view sources for answers, and more.
My Thoughts
Back in August 2024, I wrote a deep dive about Elicit*. It was a joy exploring, as it's beautifully-designed, serving meaningful and thoughtful purposes, and overall a powerful tool not only for researchers, but for everyone who wants to dive into a topic, research connections, and get a deep understanding of what you are consuming.
Recently, the news has been packed with post about loads of drawbacks that came with the evolving landscape of AI. Plagiarizing, lying to users and customers, generating fake news, hallucinating, and besides that, predictions that the energy consumption of data centers powering AI (among other things) could double by 2026, make the whole field of AI worrying. In contrary to that, it leaves me optimistic that there is a constant development of more energy-efficient technologies, while also a lot countries are at the forefront of doubling-down on renewable energy.
But why am I pointing that out?
Elicit puts AI to great use. It uses language models to extract data from and summarize research papers. As sometimes language models make up inaccurate answers, Elicit improves accuracy by fine-tuning their models on a per-task basis and constantly iterate to make them more accurate, it only shows you papers that actually eist and are part of the scientific literature, and it makes it easy for you to view the original source and point to where in a paper specific information came from. Elicit's mission to scale up good reasoning for scientist and beyond is an ethical approach to leverage AI.
It is great to see that Elicit* continues to grow. After raising $9 million in seed funding in September 2023, and becoming a public benefit corporation, Elicit raises $22 million in Series A at a $100 million valuation only 1 1/2 years later. They grew from serving more than 200,000 researchers to more than 400,000 relying on Elicit every single month. With the new funding, Elicit plans to expand beyond academic research. They want to take the transparency and systematicity they have applied to automated literature review and apply it broadly to become the standard for evidence-base AI-native decision-making.
Before stumbling across Elicit I had zero knowledge about the tools that are aimed at research, finding and reading academic papers, analyzing data, and more. There are tools like Connected Papers, which you can use to get a visual overview of a new academic field, scinapse, that gives you quick access to analytic data extracted from academic papers, Litmaps, that helps you with discovering the most relevant academic papers fast and see your research from a bird's-eye view, Unriddle, that you can use to quickly understand papers, books, and recorded audio, write and cite with AI, and keep everything organized, or Consensus, which is an AI search engine specifically for research.
While those tools are not direct competitors for Elicit, it still stands out from that selection, thanks to its beautiful design. It will be exciting to see how Elicit will evolve and leverage its new investment to take the app to the next level.
Conclusion
As Elicit continues to grow, their mission to deploy AI for good reasoning is gaining momentum. With $22 million in Series A funding, they are poised to revolutionize complex problem-solving across industries. By prioritizing transparency and accuracy, Elicit sets a high bar for responsible AI development.
What I look forward to seeing: Elicit's* expansion beyond academic research, further developing their platform to serve a broader range of users. With this growth comes potential positive impact on various sectors, making Elicit a company worth watching.
Till next time! 👋
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