(Bloomberg) -- Consensus, a startup using AI to build a search engine for scholarly work and health topics, has raised more than $11 million in funding — the latest sign of investor demand for artificial intelligence products that change how people find information online.
Consensus now has 400,000 monthly active users, including students, doctors and health-conscious consumers, who rely on the search engine to answer questions about topics as diverse as creatine supplements, the benefits of mindfulness and whether cash transfers can reduce poverty. The company’s tool summarizes documents from credible academic publications in response to user queries.
A growing number of companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, OpenAI and Perplexity, are trying to use AI to overhaul the online search experience to be more conversational and useful. Consensus is betting that it can differentiate its product from rivals with more accurate results and features geared toward researchers who care about things like citations and the quality of the journals that papers are published in.
“Specialization is our moat,” said Eric Olson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Consensus. “Everything we’re doing is trying to solve for the research use case.”
The Series A funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Draper Associates as well as investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Consensus did not disclose a valuation.
Olson started the company in 2021 with his former Northwestern University classmate and football teammate, Christian Salem, who is now the chief product officer at Consensus. Both came from a family of academics and were inspired to create a tool that could make high-quality research more digestible for scientists as well as the average user.
Consensus draws on 20 different AI systems, including OpenAIs’ GPT-4o for text summarization and smaller custom models for tasks like tallying how many research papers agree or disagree with a specific hypothesis, Olson said. The company also has access to a set of 200 million research papers and summaries provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Semantic Scholar program.
The startup has 12,000 users who pay for its product. Most of them are students and professionals who use the search engine for research instead of relying on Google. Consensus said it’s currently on pace to generate $1.5 million in annualized revenue.
While Consensus has focused on academics, investors also see an opportunity for the company to expand its reach to users who care about their health.
“People are trying to search for information to empower themselves to make decisions about their own wellness,” said Jared Hecht, a partner at Union Square Ventures. “The idea that something like this can make the research economy and this corpus of expert knowledge accessible to anybody is very exciting.”
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