Consensus, a search engine designed for scientific research, announced that it raised $3 million in new seed funding from several big-name investors.
Its new capital is led by Draper Associates, a seed-stage venture capital firm founded in 1985. The firm’s previous seed-stage investments include companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Skype, Baidu, Twitch and Hotmail.
“Search is a $200 billion global industry that is long overdue for disruption,” Tim Draper, managing partner of Draper Investments, said in a statement “We believe that the way Consensus transforms research is just the beginning of a sea change in how web users obtain information. Consensus will own Search 3.0."
Other investors include Kevin Carter, who was an early investor in Crunchbase; Brian Pokorny, who has funded Boston-based Circle, Twitter and Square; Nomad Capital; and members of the OpenAI research team.
Consensus also raised $1.25 last summer. The company said Winklevoss Capital invested in last summer’s pre-seed round and this new seed round. Winklevoss Capital was founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Bostonians might know the pair as the co-founders of HarvardConnection (renamed ConnectU) who sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea to build Facebook.
Consensus was founded by Eric Olson and Christian Salem to combat online misinformation. Salem was previously a product manager for the NFL and Olson worked in data science at DraftKings.
After the search engine’s launch last year, the co-founders told BostInno that their goal was to create a more informative search engine than Google. Rather than pulling responses to queries based on link popularity and user preferences, Consensus pulls answers from 200 million scientific and academic research papers.
The company said that thanks to a co-op with OpenAI, a customized version of GPT-4 then produces a summary of Consensus’ results. The search engine has also introduced a “Consensus-meter,” which it says provides a percentage-based assessment of the accuracy of the topic queried for yes-or-no questions.
The search engine launched last September and has about 200,000 registered users, according to Consensus. In November, Olson told BostInno they had reached 15,000 registered users.
“We are children of academics, teachers, and researchers,” Olson, Consensus’ CEO, said in a statement. ”We deeply value the truth, and were frustrated with how difficult it was to get reliable, evidence-based information from existing search engines — so we decided to fix it.”
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