Academia.edu is a San Francisco‑based platform that lets researchers, teachers and professionals share, discover and publish academic papers across disciplines including physics, chemistry, biology, health sciences, ecology, earth sciences, cognitive science, maths and computer science. Led by CEO Dr. Richard Price, the service offers recommendations, citation features and plans to host peer‑reviewed journals so academics can be reviewed and published on the platform. Academia.edu has indexed over 32 million papers dating back to the 1600s and is adding 30,000–60,000 papers each day. The site attracts about 28 million monthly visitors and its algorithms generate roughly 20 million paper recommendations per day. The platform connects users to content from 42% of the world’s faculty across more than 16,000 universities, including Oxford, MIT, Cal‑Berkeley and NYU. The company intends to use the new funding to expand its publishing and peer‑review offerings. Academia.edu is a San Francisco-based platform that hosts and distributes scholarly research, making academic papers available for free online. Founded in 2008 by Richard Price, the company offers a mobile app and a premium product suite. It reports paying subscribers at more than 11,800 universities worldwide and recently unveiled a mobile app allowing more than 23 million pieces of scholarly work to be read for free and stored offline on iOS devices. The company says it will use new funding to invest in natural language processing and machine learning to recommend papers relevant to researchers, and to continue investing in its mobile app and premium offerings. These investments target product improvement and user engagement across its free and paid services. Academia.edu is a San Francisco, CA–based online community where academics share research papers. The platform allows users to upload and share papers, monitor analytics around the impact of their research, and track the work of academics they follow. The company is led by founder and CEO Richard Price. According to the company, 4,308,424 academics have signed up, adding 1,629,811 papers and 861,492 research interests. The company raised $11.1m in a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures. As part of the financing, Khosla Ventures’ Ben Ling will join the board and Vinod Khosla will join as an advisor. Existing investors Spark Capital and True Ventures participated in the round. Academia.edu operates a social network for researchers that helps them distribute and discover scholarly papers, using SEO and analytics to track readership. In 2011 the site’s registered userbase tripled to 800,000 and researchers were uploading about 2,500 articles per day. The site drew roughly 3 million unique visitors, many arriving via Google search. Founder Richard Price said the company benefits from the Open Science/open access movement and aims to foster that trend going forward. Price also described Academia.edu as the largest platform for sharing research articles. The company announced a funding round to support expansion and continued growth of the service. Academia.edu is a web-based network designed to help researchers connect with peers and find material relevant to their fields. Launched in September 2008, the site combines social-network features—user profiles tagged with research topics—with a discovery-focused News Feed that surfaces papers based on those tags. CEO Richard Price says the academic community has been neglected by the evolution of the web and the product aims to change how academics find and share research. Users create profiles, tag themselves with research topics, keep in touch with peers, and receive a stream of recommended research items even if those items haven't been shared by contacts. As of the article, Academia.edu had 137,000 registered users, was growing by about 15,000 users per month, and received over 600,000 unique visitors monthly. Competitors mentioned include Mendeley and ResearchGate.

Total raised

$56M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series D

Latest activity

Feb 2022