Students, doctors and health-conscious consumers use Consensus to answer questions. Credit: Shutterstock

AI start-up Consensus has raised $11m in funding to develop its search engine that uses AI to provide answers to scholarly work and health queries.

The deal highlights the demand from investors for artificial intelligence leveraging search engine technology.

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With 400,000 monthly users, Consensus describes itself as “a new breed of academic search engine powered by AI, grounded in science” and has secured funding from a range of companies led by Union Square Ventures.

“Specialisation is our moat” said Eric Olson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Consensus. “Everything we’re doing is trying to solve for the research use case.”

Users of the platform include students, doctors and health-conscious consumers who rely on the search engine for its ability to answer specific wellness queries on topics such as creatine supplements, the benefits of mindfulness and whether cash transfers can reduce poverty.

The tool summarises documents from credible academic publications in response to user queries and draws on 20 different AI systems, including OpenAIs’ GPT-4o for large papers and smaller custom models for tasks like tallying arguments for certain hypothesis.

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Other companies providing the funding include Draper Associates as well as investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

Consensus has not yet disclosed a business valuation but has said it is currently on pace to generate $1.5m in annual revenue.

The company also has access to 200 million research papers and summaries provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Semantic Scholar programme as well as 12,000 users who pay to use the product.

“People are trying to search for information to empower themselves to make decisions about their own wellness,” said Jared Hecht, a partner at Union Square Ventures.

“The idea that something like this can make the research economy and this corpus of expert knowledge accessible to anybody is very exciting.”