Elicit

Elicit is an AI research assistant built by Elicit Research, PBC, a public benefit corporation based in Oakland, California. It searches over 138 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed and OpenAlex, plus 545,000 clinical trials, and supports work from a quick cited answer to a full systematic literature review. Its Research Agent, launched in August 2026, gathers evidence across the scientific literature, clinical trials, patents, regulatory and biology databases, web sources and a team's own uploaded documents, and turns it into cited reports, tables, figures, analyses and slides. Research Reports, a Systematic Review workflow that supports PRISMA 2020, a shared Library and research Alerts cover the rest of the review process. Routines let the Research Agent repeat a task on a daily or weekly schedule and report back on what changed. Elicit says it is used by over 5 million researchers, and its customer page shows 41 organizations, including NASA, NIH, the U.S. CDC, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Takeda, Unilever and the Gates Foundation.

Elicit publishes an MCP server and an API on the Pro, Scale and Enterprise plans, covering paper search, reports and systematic reviews, so the same capabilities can run inside Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini or any other MCP-compatible client. Papers can be imported from Zotero or uploaded as PDFs, RIS and BIB files, results export to RIS, CSV, BIB, PDF and DOCX, and a browser extension gives full-text access to papers through a user's own journal subscriptions. The paper corpus is drawn from Semantic Scholar, PubMed and OpenAlex.

Prices are in US dollars, and the pricing page has separate Industry and Academic ladders. On Industry pricing, Basic is free, Pro is $49 per user per month billed annually ($588 a year) or $75 billed monthly, and Scale is $229 per user per month billed annually ($2,748 a year) or $375 billed monthly, with five times Pro's usage. Academic pricing adds a Plus plan at $11 per user per month billed annually or $19 monthly, with Pro at $39 or $69 and Scale at $89 or $149. Enterprise is priced by quote. Elicit does not offer a separate nonprofit discount and points nonprofits to its academic plans.

Every plan draws on a single monthly usage pool shared across the Research Agent, Reports and Systematic Literature Reviews, and unused usage does not roll over. Basic has limited usage. The API and MCP server start on Pro, the Pro systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers, figure extraction and real-time collaboration start on Scale, and SSO and SAML, single-tenant deployment and screening of up to 40,000 papers are on Enterprise. Pro and Scale users can turn on extra usage, billed in $100 increments up to a monthly limit they set, and Basic and Plus users who reach their limit keep Find Papers and Chat with Papers until the next cycle.

Elicit suits researchers and research teams in pharma, medical devices, academia, policy and consumer goods who run literature reviews or need cited evidence for research decisions. Researchers who want to see where peer-reviewed studies agree on one specific question should also look at Consensus, those checking whether later papers support or contrast a finding should look at Scite.ai, and those exploring a field through visual citation maps should look at Litmaps.

Current state Q4 2026: Elicit launched its Research Agent in August 2026 and moved every plan to a monthly usage pool in June 2026. In September 2026 it turned its Library into a shared research hub, where the Research Agent can search a team's collections and save papers to them, and on September 30 it introduced Routines. Its trust center publishes a SOC 2 Type 2 report, a 2026 bridge letter and Cyber Essentials, and names Anthropic and OpenAI among its subprocessors for AI responses, with custom models hosted on CoreWeave. Enterprise plans state no training on customer data by default, and the API terms state that API input is not used to train AI models unless a user opts in. Elicit is designed for use in English. It raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital and Footwork in February 2025.