Consensus Raises $11.5 Million to Expand AI-Powered Scientific Search Engine

Consensus and its investors reportedly see an opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to power a search engine focused on delivering information from scientific research papers to academics, students, doctors and average users who are interested in health issues.

“Specialization is our moat,” Eric Olson, co-founder and CEO of Consensus, told Bloomberg in a report posted Wednesday (Aug. 14). “Everything we’re doing is trying to solve for the research use case.”

Consensus said in a July 23 blog post that it raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. It added that since the launch of its search engine in winter 2022, it has gained 400,000 monthly active users and $1.5 million in annualized revenue.

In the Bloomberg report, Jared Hecht, a partner at Union Square Ventures, said the search engine can serve people who are looking for information that will help them make decisions about their own wellness.

“The idea that something like this can make the research economy and this corpus of expert knowledge accessible to anybody is very exciting,” Hecht said in the report.

With its AI search engine, Consensus aims to make it easier to search and consume information from scientific literature that is currently time-consuming for researchers to go through and out of reach for non-academic people to access, according to the company’s blog post.

“We’ve been humbled by the thousands of stories we’ve heard from users about how Consensus has helped them,” Olson said in the post. “From students and researchers who’ve saved countless hours on their literature reviews, to doctors who have replaced all ‘Google-ing’ on the job with a Consensus search. Consensus has also enabled users to engage with peer-reviewed literature who had seldom read a research paper before.”

Consensus will use the new round of financing to expand its team and “double down on building the best scientific search engine the world has ever seen,” Olson said in the post.

AI is changing how users search the web and shop online, making the experience more personalized and intuitive, PYMNTS reported in May. AI tools can deeply understand complex queries and deliver tailored results and recommendations.

Some other companies that have recently raised funding for AI-powered search tools include Glean, which offers search software that helps employees find information from across their organizations; Perplexity, which aims to compete with Google’s search engine; and Constructor, which is expanding its product discovery and search platform for enterprise eCommerce companies.