Consensus Raises $3M, Partners with OpenAI to Revolutionize Scientific Web Search

Eric Olson

Boston-based Consensus has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Draper Associates, as it bets on an AI-powered search engine that can sift through research papers, pitting it directly against Google Scholar, a subset of the internet giant’s search offerings.

Also investing in the round were pre-seed round investor, New York-based Winklevoss Capital, the family office established by the twins who co-founded Facebook; Puerto Rico’s Nomad Capital; and angel investors Kevin Carter (Crunchbase, Snap, Pinterest), Brian Pokorny (Twitter, Square, Stitcher), and members of the OpenAI research team.

Ties with ChatGPT Parent

The startup also announced a partnership with OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot that has raised potentially the biggest challenge to Google’s over 25-year-old search monopoly.

“Seeing Consensus organically pop up all over the internet has been equal parts mind-blowing and heart-warming,” Consensus co-founder and CEO Eric Olson said in a LinkedIn post. “Proud to say that word-of-mouth has been responsible for exactly 100% of our growth to over 150,000 users.”

Olson, a former DraftKings Analytics executive and football player, joined his Northwestern University alum Christian Salem in starting Consensus. Olson has an MS in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern, while Salem has a BS in Economics. Salem has worked as product manager at NFL.

Consensus is focused as a “go-to” source for expert information, and won’t go head to head with Google in broader search. However, it thinks it can make a dent on Google Scholar, which it believes has not sufficiently innovated. It claims to provide more accurate search results when it comes to parsing about 200 million scientific and academic research papers.

‘Will Own Search 3.0’

“Our goal is to use language models to automate the steps that an expert would take in rigorously concluding a question, and build an intuitive and easy-to-use search experience around those automated steps,” Olson told VentureBeat.

Tim Draper, the founder of Draper Associates, believes “Consensus transforms research” and “will own Search 3.0.”

With a partnership with OpenAI, Consensus has taken GPT-4, the most recent tech version powering ChatGPT, and customized its use.

The search “summary will run over the first 5-10 results, and will only include answers that our model believes are relevant enough to your question,” the company said in a recent blog. Importantly, the results appear directly below the summary box and list only peer-reviewed sources.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Draper Associates has raised $420 million via two funds. It has made 351 portfolio investments and 53 exits since its founding in 2015. Its recent portfolio investments include Fursure, Hume, MyStandard, FiscalNote, GamerGains Lab and Crusoe Energy Systems.