Consensus, an AI-enabled academic search engine for scientific research, raised $11.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures.

Perplexity lead investors Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman participated in the round alongside former Seed investors Kevin Carter, Draper Associates, Alumni Ventures and Path Ventures.

WHAT IT DOES

The company is building an AI-powered search engine to make scientific research papers discoverable, consumable and accessible. 

The user provides a prompt with a question to the AI and then receives literature with answers pertaining to the inquiry. It also synthesizes insights across literature and extracts information related to the specific research found, such as sample size and population.

Boston-based Consensus will use the funds to expand its workforce, invest in growth experiments and speed up product development. 

"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 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 intended to accelerate research discovery. 

Semantic Scholar offers a free AI-enabled research tool for scientific literature aimed at helping researchers extract meaning, and identify connections between papers.

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