AnswerThis
End-to-end workspace to accelerate scientific discovery
Hello YC! We’re Ayush Garg and Ryan Mccarroll from AnswerThis.
TL;DR
AnswerThis analyzes all the relevant research in your field to answer complex scientific questions with line-by-line citations. Over 250,000 researchers have saved months on their literature reviews using AnswerThis, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in the research space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKTS2QWnjqw
Problem
Over 5 million research papers are published every year. Researchers spend months crawling through academic databases to conduct their literature reviews. By the time they finish, new literature has often been published.
When they finally have their literature collected, they must read dense papers while taking detailed notes. If they want to explore a new aspect of the topic, they have to repeat the process, making it difficult to advance science quickly.
Once they have their notes, synthesizing the findings into a detailed literature review requires precision, highly accurate citations, and concise but informative scientific writing.
This entire process is extremely time consuming, and takes away from actual experimentation.
Solution
Enter your question, select your filters, and AnswerThis searches multiple academic databases to answer it with exact citations to every relevant paper. The literature review that took months, now takes minutes.
You can save the sources, analyze them, and write with our AI assistant on a single platform while collaborating with your team.
We also integrate with tools researchers already use, like Zotero and Mendeley, and we offer advanced exports that correctly carry over citations and equations.
The user is able to verify each source, and save it to their AnswerThis library:
Our story
Ayush, the son of two PhD scholars, began publishing peer-reviewed articles at 16, with early work in natural language processing focused on parsing scientific literature.
Ryan, who leads product and growth, started selling products at 17 and scaled multiple Instagram accounts to hundreds of thousands of followers.
Together, they bring a blend of research depth and growth expertise, united by a passion for accelerating scientific discovery.
In the last two months, AnswerThis has answered over 250,000 scientific queries!
Our ask
If you’re a researcher or just want to try the product, please visit AnswerThis.io. We’d value your feedback.
We’d also welcome introductions to:
- Post-clinical-trial researchers conducting literature screening
- Directors at academic labs
- Medical Directors
Contact:
Ayush Garg: Ayush@AnswerThis.io
Ryan Mccarroll: Ryan@AnswerThis.io
How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
Ayush grew up watching his mother, a researcher, spend countless hours buried in papers under constant deadline pressure. When he began publishing his own peer-reviewed research, he ran into the same inefficiencies firsthand.
Since age 16, he had been building tools to make research faster, including pygetpapers for automated research paper downloads, software to standardize ethics statements in medical research, and a parser for IPCC climate reports.
Meanwhile, Ryan was taking his own entrepreneurial path. In high school he co-founded Crackin’ Coffee, a subscription startup that shipped boxes from local roasters to customers in ten countries. He later sold Instagram management services and built Deep Point Lab, which grew to $8k MRR by selling websites and marketing services to small businesses. Those early ventures gave him a foundation in sales, user psychology, and scrappy execution.
The release of large language models marked an inflection point. Ayush and Ryan, who by then were roommates and best friends in college, realized they could finally tackle research inefficiency at scale. They teamed up to build AnswerThis.
From launch, researchers subscribed immediately. Many reported that AnswerThis helped them finish theses in weeks instead of months and raised the quality of their work by making far more prior research accessible.
What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
Our long-term vision is grounded in two fundamental truths that deeply motivate us: humanity must become a multiplanetary species, and humans must live longer, healthier lives. Both goals require a dramatic acceleration in scientific progress. That is what we are building AnswerThis to enable.
We are starting with research papers and academia, but our ambition is to expand across all knowledge formats and empower every kind of knowledge worker. Research will no longer be buried in static PDFs, and discovery will not be limited to PhDs. Scientists will be empowered by adaptive tools instead of held back by software that has not changed in a decade.
If we truly succeed, science itself will move faster. The barriers to accessing, understanding, and applying knowledge will collapse, and the pace of discovery will match the urgency of humanity’s biggest challenges.
