Elicit
Footwork co-leads the Series A in the trusted AI platform for evidence-based decisions.
The majority of Footwork’s portfolio companies are building with AI as a core why now (such as WindBorne in weather forecasting, GPTZero in content detection, ReflexAI in high stakes contact center training and QA, and several we have yet to announce), but there’s a common theme amongst their founders: they didn’t just get excited about AI in the past two and a half years.
Perhaps no company’s story exemplifies this more so than Elicit’s, the leading AI platform for research. Andreas Stuhlmüller, Elicit’s co-founder and CEO, started thinking about automating reasoning as a teenager, published his first paper about generative learning processes in 2010, completed his PhD in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, became a postdoc in computation and cognition at Stanford, and started a non-profit, Ought, in 2017 to work on the mission of scaling up good reasoning, five years before the world woke up to LLMs. Jungwon Byun, co-founder and COO, has always been obsessed by building companies, worked on a microfinance organization while an undergrad at Yale, saw the power of machine learning while working at Upstart as their head of growth, and joined Andreas to work on Ought in 2019.
As their work progressed at the intersection of machine learning and decision-making, with advancements in LLMs catalyzing it further, they built a product to help researchers automate analysis such as literature reviews and systematic reviews. Elicit was born, and as the product gained organic customer love and adoption, they decided to spin it out from Ought as a for-profit public benefit corporation last year. Elicit’s mission — to scale up good reasoning for scientists and beyond — remains true to Ought’s, and to Andreas’s lifelong pursuit.
Last year we wrote a post on one of the genes we look for most in entrepreneurs we want to invest in: the ability to take a decades-long view. We sought out an introduction (thank you Seth Bannon for making it!) to Andreas and Jungwon as we got the feeling from the outside-looking-in that they were building towards an audacious long-term vision. And as we got to know them and the broader Elicit team, we found that they express this gene in spades. That’s why we’re delighted today to announce that Footwork has co-led Elicit’s $22M Series A alongside Spark Capital, and existing investors Fifty Years, Basis Set, and, Mythos. Check out more from the company in its blog post today.
So what is Elicit?
One of the time-consuming aspects of scientific research is the systematic review, where researchers synthesize the existing research on a question or problem they are working on. Analyzing all the evidence can take months to complete, but with Elicit’s product, it can take minutes. You can upload research papers or use their search to scan all existing published papers with natural language, ask questions to understand what specific papers say about a topic, create a table of summaries and other key findings from the research, export all of this information, and thereby speed up literature reviews and systematic reviews.
Today, they’re taking systematic reviews a step further, launching Elicit Reports: fully-automated research overviews. You start with a research question. Elicit will suggest ways to clarify the question or explore additional angles. Elicit will then conduct a rapid review (search, screening, and data extraction) to write the Report. Unlike other AI Deep Research tools, you can understand and edit every step used to produce the Report — which papers were included, what information was summarized, etc. — because Elicit Reports follow the systematic review process. You can also extend a report by chatting with it. Ask questions about specific claims and papers, or have it summarize certain report sections. You can even ask it about the underlying information, even if it wasn't covered directly in the report. Try it now, for free — it is a magical experience. Or check out an example report: What are the effects of microplastic exposure during pregnancy?
And why did we invest?
As we dug into the business with Andreas and Jungwon, we got excited about Elicit’s early signs of product-market fit. Since launching last year, Elicit has grown through word-of-mouth to over 400,000 monthly active active users, tens of thousands of paying subscribers, and millions in annual revenue. In the process, researchers have saved many, many hours of work. The team’s north star metric is NPS, which climbs every month due to users loving the product even more as the team iterates on it and makes it better.
We also got compelled by the market and its changing tides. The research and publishing industries feel like they will change significantly in the coming decade, as backlash to peer review and the publishing process, and the chance to make much faster progress in science with AI, come to the fore. Elicit’s product could only exist today given the recent advancements in LLMs, and we believe AI will do more and more of the work of researchers, leading to faster breakthroughs, in the future.
And most of all, we felt like this is a team that we have to partner with, because of its vision and because we believe they will find a way to realize it. Elicit has the opportunity to expand both vertically within the scientific research workflows, and horizontally to other markets, to be the research operating system powering better decision-making. Andreas and Jungwon have held a very high bar for hiring, with folks on the team like Kevin Bird, head of product, who was the first PM at Nubank and had an incredible 8 year journey there, James Barry, head of engineering, who was previously VP Engineering at Teespring, which he joined after selling his prior company to Square, and Chad Thornton, head of design, who led design at Airtable, Dropbox, and Medium. They ship product, consistently and quickly. They have very intentionally crafted values, and spell out why you will and will not love working there.
An ambitious team that is executing at a high level. A market that’s large and poised for change. And a bunch of signs of customers love, with the rapidly-improving product really saving time and money in the research process already. Those are the reasons we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Elicit. And if you want to radically increase the amount of good reasoning and truth in the world, come join us.
