Elicit becomes a public benefit corporation after raising $9M in seed funding
Elicit, the AI-powered research assistant born at Ought, is now an independent public benefit corporation. After raising $9M in funding, they plan to keep on developing their service and expand their team.
After being incubated at Ought, a non-profit research organization created to deliver machine learning that helps good human reasoning, Elicit is now an independent public benefit corporation hosting its flagship service, an AI assistant for researchers and academics. In announcing Elicit's independence from Ought, the latter published a blog post stating they "believe that this decision is the best way to pursue Ought’s mission, by allowing Elicit to raise funding and scale up its efforts."
The non-profit also stated that the decision financially made sense for them, considering the value of the stake they now hold at Elicit. The $9 million seed investment was led by Fifty Years, with the participation of other VC firms and angel investors with tech and AI expertise, including GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.
The company accompanied the funding announcement with the release of the newest version of its academic AI assistant. This version introduces the capability to discover concepts across papers. This means that in addition to asking for paper searches, users can now ask questions related to a single concept, such as What are all of the effects of creatine? An in-depth look at Elicit's current features can be found here.
The company announced that they plan on using their funding to develop their product and expand their team. The company openly stated that they are currently hiring and published a list of open positions.
