Elicit - NBT Substack Profile

Elicit - by Nikhil Basu Trivedi and Mike Smith 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 

 

 

 

 
 next big thing 

 Subscribe Sign in Elicit

 Footwork co-leads the Series A in the trusted AI platform for evidence-based decisions.

 Nikhil Basu Trivedi and Mike Smith Feb 26, 2025 12 Share The majority of Footwork’s portfolio companies are building with AI as a core why now (such as WindBorne in weather forecasting, GPTZero in content detection, ReflexAI in high stakes contact center training and QA, and several we have yet to announce), but there’s a common theme amongst their founders: they didn’t just get excited about AI in the past two and a half years. 

 Perhaps no company’s story exemplifies this more so than Elicit ’s, the leading AI platform for research. Andreas Stuhlmüller , Elicit’s co-founder and CEO, started thinking about automating reasoning as a teenager, published his first paper about generative learning processes in 2010, completed his PhD in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, became a postdoc in computation and cognition at Stanford, and started a non-profit, Ought , in 2017 to work on the mission of scaling up good reasoning, five years before the world woke up to LLMs. Jungwon Byun , co-founder and COO, has always been obsessed by building companies, worked on a microfinance organization while an undergrad at Yale, saw the power of machine learning while working at Upstart as their head of growth, and joined Andreas to work on Ought in 2019. 

 As their work progressed at the intersection of machine learning and decision-making, with advancements in LLMs catalyzing it further, they built a product to help researchers automate analysis such as literature reviews and systematic reviews. Elicit was born, and as the product gained organic customer love and adoption, they decided to spin it out from Ought as a for-profit public benefit corporation last year. Elicit’s mission — to scale up good reasoning for scientists and beyond — remains true to Ought’s, and to Andreas’s lifelong pursuit. 

 The Elicit team as of early ‘25. Last year we wrote a post on one of the genes we look for most in entrepreneurs we want to invest in: the ability to take a decades-long view . We sought out an introduction (thank you Seth Bannon for making it!) to Andreas and Jungwon as we got the feeling from the outside-looking-in that they were building towards an audacious long-term vision. And as we got to know them and the broader Elicit team, we found that they express this gene in spades. That’s why we’re delighted today to announce that Footwork has co-led Elicit’s $22M Series A alongside Spark Capital, and existing investors Fifty Years, Basis Set, and, Myt

... (truncated, 8 KB total)