Ought announces Elicit, a tool to automate scientific literature review
Elicit raises $9 million and becomes a public benefit corporation

    
        
    Sep 25, 2023
    

    



    
        
    


    We're excited to share that Elicit has raised $9 million in seed funding. Elicit was born at Ought, a non-profit research organization, and is now an independent public benefit corporation. Like Ought, our mission is to scale up good reasoning using machine learning, starting with researchers.Elicit is designed to automate scientific research with language models. It streamlines the research process by finding relevant papers, extracting key information, and organizing the information into concepts. Today, over 200,000 researchers use Elicit every month, from top research labs at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to cutting-edge companies like Genentech, Novartis, and OpenAI.The seed investment was led by deep tech seed fund Fifty Years, with participation from Basis Set, Illusian, Mythos, Julian, and angel investors with expertise in AI & AI alignment, startups, and research, including Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of Github, Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, Thomas Ebeling, former CEO of Novartis, and Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google.Along with the fundraise, we are launching a new version of Elicit that not only performs paper searches but also discovers concepts across papers. This means users can ask questions like "What are all of the effects of creatine?" or "What are all of the datasets that have been used to study logical reasoning?" and get a comprehensive list of answers from the academic literature.The funding will be used to further develop our product and expand our team. We are currently hiring product managers and software engineers to contribute to our mission of making research more well-reasoned, efficient, and accessible.



    
