Consensus was founded in 2021 by Christian Salem and Eric Olson to make scientific literature searchable and readable outside academia. Users ask a natural-language question and the product returns relevant peer-reviewed papers with extracted claims, study design labels and synthesized summaries across a corpus the company describes as 220M+ papers. Beyond search, Consensus is expanding into literature review, organization, writing and peer-review workflows, which the company calls an "AI OS for researchers." At the time of its 2024 Series A it reported 400,000 monthly active users and $1.5M in annualized revenue; by May 2026 it reported more than 2.5 million monthly active users.
Funding
In July 2024 Consensus announced an $11.5M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, joined by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and existing seed investors including Draper Associates. In May 2026 it announced a $30M round led by GreatPoint Ventures, whose partner DJ Patil (former U.S. Chief Data Scientist) joined the board, with participation from existing investors Union Square Ventures, NFDG and Draper Associates.