Sciencescape is a Canadian academic research platform that employs natural language processing and content-identification algorithms to generate curated feeds of papers and studies for academics, researchers, and students. The platform aims to make the large volume of academic research more manageable for people doing real academic work. The startup recently closed a $2.5M funding round and is considering extending it to $3M after the round was oversubscribed. Sciencescape has partnered with Elsevier, which provides the company with access to 11 million full-text articles directly through the platform without requiring external subscriptions. The company was part of the Extreme Startups accelerator and co-founder Sam Molyneux announced the update at the accelerator's demo day in Toronto. Observers note Elsevier's prior acquisition of Mendeley, making further consolidation or acquisition a possibility to watch. Sciencescape uses natural language processing to funnel new publications in real time and build intelligent, subject- and entity-focused feeds for researchers. The engine is initially focused on biomedical fields and produces visualizations (graphs and charts) to show research timelines and key breakthroughs, plus sharing options for collaborators. The team positions the product as the “plumbing” for academic and medical research to help researchers avoid reinventing the wheel amid massive publication volumes. Sciencescape cites a recent count of 22 billion papers published annually and frames the academic research market at roughly $45 billion per year. The company plans to expand quickly into other fields (the article specifically mentions law on the roadmap). It has secured initial funding of $1.1 million and hopes to move rapidly to grow the business and product coverage.

Total raised

$4M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jan 2014