Elicit Raises $9 Million and Becomes a Public Benefit Corporation

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Elicit, an AI-powered research automation tool spun out of Ought (an AI safety-focused nonprofit), announces $9M seed funding and conversion to a public benefit corporation, signaling a model for mission-driven AI deployment in scientific research.

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Importance: 28/100press releasenews

Summary

Elicit, originally incubated at the AI safety nonprofit Ought, has raised $9M in seed funding and incorporated as a public benefit corporation. The tool automates scientific literature review using language models and serves over 200,000 researchers monthly. The funding will support product development and team expansion.

Key Points

•Elicit raised $9M seed round led by Fifty Years, with participation from investors including Jeff Dean and co-founders of GitHub and Dropbox.
•Spun out of Ought, an AI safety nonprofit, Elicit retains the mission to scale good reasoning using machine learning.
•Over 200,000 researchers use Elicit monthly, including those at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Genentech, Novartis, and OpenAI.
•New product version enables concept discovery across papers, allowing comprehensive literature synthesis on specific questions.
•Incorporation as a public benefit corporation reflects a governance model balancing commercial growth with mission alignment.

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Elicit Raises $9 Million and Becomes a Public Benefit Corporation

Andreas Stuhlmüller

Cofounder & CEO

Company

Sep 25, 2023

1 min read

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.