AnswerThis

Alumni Q&A

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 with a researcher mother and later ran into research inefficiencies himself when publishing peer-reviewed work; from age 16 he built research tools including pygetpapers for automated paper downloads, software to standardize ethics statements in medical research, and an IPCC report parser. His co-founder Ryan came from a sales and startup background, having co-founded a coffee subscription company that shipped to ten countries and later building Deep Point Lab to $8k MRR selling websites and marketing to small businesses. The two were college roommates who started AnswerThis after large language models made it feasible to address research inefficiency at scale, and researchers subscribed from launch.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders aim to accelerate scientific progress, starting with research papers and academia before expanding to other knowledge formats and knowledge workers, so that accessing and applying knowledge becomes faster and less restricted to PhDs.