Consensus and its investors reportedly see an opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI) to power a search engine focused on providing information on scientific research papers to academics, students, physicians and general users interested in health issues.
“Specialization is our strength,” Consensus co-founder and CEO Eric Olson told Bloomberg in a report published Wednesday (August 14). “Everything we do is geared toward solving research use cases.”
Consensus announced in a blog post on July 23 that it had raised $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. The company added that since launching its search engine in winter 2022, it has reached 400,000 monthly active users and $1.5 million in annualized revenue.
Jared Hecht, a partner at Union Square Ventures, said the search engine could help people looking for information to help them make health decisions, Bloomberg reported.
“The idea that something like this could make research economies and pools of expertise accessible to everyone is incredibly exciting,” Hecht said in the report.
According to a company blog post, Consensus aims to use an AI search engine to make it easier for researchers to find and use information in the scientific literature that is time-consuming for researchers and inaccessible to non-academics.
“We've been thrilled to hear thousands of stories from users about how Consensus has helped them,” Olson said in the post, “from students and researchers who have saved countless hours of literature reviews to doctors who have replaced all their “Google searches” at work with Consensus searches. Consensus has also enabled users who previously rarely read research articles to engage with peer-reviewed literature.”
Consensus will use the new funding to expand its team and “focus on building the best scientific search engine the world has ever seen,” Olson said in the post.
PYMNTS reported in May that AI is changing the way people search the web and shop online, making the experience more personalized and intuitive. AI tools can deeply understand complex queries and provide customized results and recommendations.
Other companies that have recently raised funding for AI-powered search tools include Glean, which offers search software to help employees find information across organizations, Perplexity, which aims to take on Google's search engine, and Constructor, which is expanding its product discovery and search platform for enterprise e-commerce companies.
Read more: AI, artificial intelligence, consensus, funding, investing, news, PYMNTS News, search engines, technology, Union Square Ventures, Hot Topics
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