Elicit was incubated within Ought, a nonprofit research lab that did research and built tools. As Elicit's user base exploded and generative AI became mainstream, Ought's board, donors, and employees agreed that scaling Elicit through the private sector would best achieve our mission to scale high-quality reasoning.
Becoming a for-profit company allows us to scale revenues without running into tricky tax situations (though non-profits can & do charge revenue), become an even more competitive talent magnet, and maximize Elicit's impact without being funding-constrained.
Our profit goals, product goals, and mission are quite well-aligned. If Elicit does not help people research better, we will not make any money. However, to emphasize the importance of our mission, we set Elicit up as a Public Benefit Corporation. This establishes researchers as key stakeholders in addition to shareholders.
We've raised $9 million
We also raised a $9 million seed round! With this round, we get to team up with a suite of investors who have built the companies we hope to become. We specifically chose investors with experiences we need but don't have, understand the overwhelming challenges of starting a company, and share our values. All are ex-founders or operators.
We're publicly launching the new Elicit
This one's less exciting because you knew the secret before everyone else, but we're also publicly launching the new Elicit :) There's a ton of work left but our strategy is always to launch uncomfortably early and build around your specific feedback.
Want to help?
If you'd like to help us make the most of this moment, here are some things that would be helpful for us!
Send us the best engineers & product managers you know so that they can squash more of Elicit's bugs and finally build you that Zotero integration!
Share the press coverage on social media (so that we can hire the best people to build all of your feature requests)
Follow our new LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube accounts. We'll be sharing tutorials to this new YouTube page going forward
We couldn't have built Elicit without your feedback or raised this round without your engagement. Thanks for helping us convert a lofty vision into a real tool helping researchers. We have an insanely long list of all the features we want to build and this round will help us do that.
You're receiving this email because you signed up for Elicit, an AI research assistant. To view this email in your browser or share it, use this link. You can see all recent product announcements here. Click to unsubscribe from this list.