Participated · Equity · Sep 2023

Elicit is a for‑profit startup spun out from the nonprofit Ought that builds an AI-powered research assistant to automate scientific literature review. Its product searches academic papers, extracts key information, and organizes findings into concepts using a mix of first- and third‑party language models. Elicit breaks complex model tasks into human-understandable pieces to monitor hallucination rates and always links generated answers back to source literature. The platform also computes a paper-level "trustworthiness" score using factors such as trial design, funding sources, conflicts and sample size. Co-founder Andreas Stuhlmüller leads the company; co-founder Jungwon Byun joined in 2019. More than 200,000 people use Elicit monthly, representing 3x year-over-year growth starting January 2023, and users include The World Bank, Genentech and Stanford. Elicit launched a paid tier and plans to use new funding to further develop the product and expand its team of product managers and software engineers.