Artificial intelligence research hub alphaXiv said today it has raised $7 million in seed funding to accelerate its mission of helping engineers transform the latest academic discoveries into cutting-edge AI features.

The round was co-led by the venture capital powerhouse Menlo Ventures and Haystack. It also included participation from Shakti VC and Conviction Embed, plus angel investors such as former Google LLC Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Udacity Inc. co-founder Sebastian Thrun.

AlphaXiv is the creator of an academic research hub that’s similar to the open access archive arXiv.com, only it’s laser-focused on AI. The startup says it’s aiming to serve applied AI teams by streamlining their paths from research to production. Researchers use the platform to publish their latest papers, and engineers can browse through them, find all of the latest discoveries and innovations, compare new methods, techniques and baselines, and use the newfound knowledge to create new AI features.

Raj Palleti, co-founder of alphaXiv, said the amount of AI research being done today is staggering. Every single day, researchers publish tens, if not hundreds, of new papers detailing the latest model training techniques and other developments. There’s such a deluge of research papers being published that it creates immense headaches for AI teams that want to keep up with all of the latest developments.

“Researchers across universities and companies are continually asking what matters most, what’s truly useful and how to apply it effectively,” Palleti said. “We’re proud to provide the solution.”

In addition to supporting engineers looking to leverage the most up-to-date AI research, alphaXiv also supports the academics that perform the bulk of that work. The platform aims to become the de facto global workspace for AI researchers, offering various research tools and fostering collaboration between scholars, Ph.D. students and other academics from across the world, similar to how GitHub helps software developers collaborate. Already, it has helped to facilitate a growing number of international collaborations between AI researchers in countries such as the U.S. and China, all of which have been documented on its platform.

Thrun said he’s backing alphaXiv because the audience for AI research has never been larger, and it provides just the kind of collaborative hub the community desperately needs. “People are looking for new ways to get involved in research that go beyond having a Ph.D.,” he said. “A decade ago everyone wanted to be a software engineer. Today they want to be a research engineer.”

AlphaXiv launched its platform last year, and claims to have reached “millions of users” already spanning both industry and academia.

Menlo Ventures Partner Deedy Das said alphaXiv is creating opportunities for thousands of people to forge new careers in the AI industry. He pointed out that every major technological revolution is followed by a massive change in the kinds of jobs that people can do, and he believes the same will be true for AI.

“As AI begins to automate more software, more people will start doing an even higher order of knowledge work – research to expand human knowledge,” Das said. “AlphaXiv is building the infrastructure to power that future.”

Image: AlphaXiv