Elicit

What is Elicit and who sells it?

Elicit's homepage describes "AI for Scientific Research" with semantic search across more than 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials (elicit.com). It claims to be trusted by over 5 million researchers. A blog post from its February 2025 Series A gave a different figure, more than 400,000 researchers every month.

The company is Elicit Research, PBC, a public benefit corporation based in Oakland, California. It began inside Ought, a nonprofit founded by Andreas Stuhlmuller and Jungwon Byun, and spun out in 2023. Funding came as a $9M seed in September 2023 led by Fifty Years and a $22M Series A in February 2025 led by Spark Capital and Footwork, at a $100M valuation according to Elicit's blog. That is about $31M in total.

What does it do well?

Elicit bundles several workflows. Search is semantic. Research reports produce cited summaries. A systematic review workflow screens papers and extracts data into columns. A Library stores papers, Routines sends alerts, and the Basic plan imports from Zotero. Elicit says it can find up to 1,000 relevant papers and analyze up to 20,000 data points at once, with sentence-level citations (elicit.com). The vendor says researchers report up to 80% time savings, which is the vendor's figure.

Extraction is where outside studies are kindest. A proof-of-concept that used Elicit as a second reviewer for data extraction reported 91.0% accuracy, 89.4% recall and 98.9% precision. A feasibility study in Research Synthesis Methods found that 90% of extracted values matched across accounts, but supporting quotes matched only 46% of the time and reasoning only 30%.

Where does it fall short?

Search recall is the weak point. A 2025 systematic review of 18 studies on Elicit reported average sensitivity of 37.9% and precision of 39.6%. Extraction accuracy averaged about 74% for qualitative data and 51.4% for quantitative data. A test across four Cochrane-linked reviews found that Elicit located 39.5% of included studies, against 94.5% for conventional searches.

Elicit's own evaluation reports much better numbers on 994 Cochrane reviews: 95.0% search recall, 96.9% screening sensitivity and 95.6% extraction accuracy. Elicit lists caveats, including a restriction to open-access papers. Vendor and independent figures disagree by a wide margin.

Blog reviews such as fast.io add that results are not fully repeatable, that it cannot assess risk of bias, and that extraction needs manual checking.

How much does Elicit cost?

Basic is free, with limited use of the Research Agent and Research Reports. On the annual-billing view of elicit.com/pricing in October 2026, Pro is $49 per user per month billed as $588 annually, Scale is $169 per user per month billed as $2,028 annually, and Enterprise is custom. Pro includes API access and a systematic review workflow that screens 5,000 papers with 20 columns. Enterprise screens 40,000 papers with 40 columns. Monthly-billing prices are not shown.

What about security and data?

Enterprise plans list SSO and SAML, two-factor authentication, single tenancy, and no training on customer data by default. Elicit announced SOC 2 Type II, with the report under NDA. No HIPAA or BAA statement is published.

Who is it for?

A resident preparing a journal club question will get a good first pass in minutes. A research librarian can run it as one more search beside the usual databases. A guideline group can use extraction for a second-reviewer check on data a human has already pulled. A review team that needs documented, reproducible searching still has to run PubMed, Embase and the rest.

The verdict

Elicit belongs at the start of a literature question and again at the end as a check. Pay for Pro only if you will use the screening and extraction columns every week, and keep a bibliographic database in the search protocol.