Big name investors back AI start-up Outread

Google’s chief scientist and start-up accelerator Techstars are among new investors backing an Adelaide company that has built an AI platform to summarise complex research papers.

From left: Outread's Dhruv Sirohi, Janhvi Sirohi and Anshika Singh.

Google’s chief scientist and start-up accelerator Techstars are among a group of new investors backing an Adelaide company that’s developed an AI platform to simplify and summarise complex research papers.

Established in 2023 by siblings Janhvi and Dhruv Sirohi, and their friend Anshika Singh, Outread raised an oversubscribed $750,000 in a pre-seed round to accelerate its product development and growth.

Backed by the global Techstars accelerator, the funding round secured investment from several Google and Amazon Web Services executives, including Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean and its finance vice president Fiona Bones.

Mr Dean said Outread was using machine learning and AI technologies to make complex research accessible and digestible for a wider number of consumers.

“I believe the area of tools for understanding large collections of documents, and being able to summarise, contrast and answer questions about these corpora, is an important and valuable one, and the founding team at Outread seems strong and passionate about this area,” he said.

“That is why I invested in their early stage funding round.”

The founders established Outread in a bid to improve access to, and use of, the more than five million academic research papers that are published each year.

They set about using machine learning to separate credible, actionable information from the “noise”.

The co-founders moved to Sydney for three months in 2023 to participate in the inaugural Techstars Sydney accelerator.

With the recent round of funding the company is now looking to develop the Outread platform further, and bring in key staff to support the company’s rapid growth. Outread is also being piloted by several corporate clients, including some of the big four consulting firms.

Chief executive Janhvi Sirohi said the company had been looking to raise $500,000, but due to investor interest, it was likely that figure would be closer to $750,000.

Sasha Baranikov, a co-founder of Uniti Group, which sold for $3.7bn in 2022, is also an ­investor.

“At Outread our mission is to leverage AI to enhance productivity and ensure users remain on the cutting edge of developments, illustrating the transformative potential of technology in making complex information readily available,” Ms Sirohi said.

“Companies can integrate the Outread dashboard into their workflow, which aids them by acting as a feeder into specific advisory, research, or thought leadership outputs.

“Leveraging third-party research can bolster findings and recommendations, support proposal generation, augment case studies and credentials with formal research, as well as foster a baseline of understanding across teams based on the latest research and thinking.”