Academia.edu Grows to 175 Million Users While Gathering 32% of the World's Research Papers

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Academia.edu, the academic world's platform for sharing research papers, has grown to 175 million users and is nearing half of the world's academic research content. With around 100 million papers written since the 1600s, Academia aims to make every research paper ever written freely available on the internet. This growth has attracted $23 million in Series D funding led by Tencent, bringing the total investment raised to $63 million. True Ventures and Greyrock Investments also participated in the funding round. With this new funding, the company aims to expand into allowing academics to be peer-reviewed and published in journals hosted on the Academia platform.

"What started as a personal project to share my philosophy research now provides more than fifteen times the amount of content than the number of books published each year - that inspires me," said Dr. Richard Price, founder and Chief Executive Officer, previously Oxford University academic and serial entrepreneur, "I thank our investors for continuing to back the company and its journey from the ivory towers to the information superhighway." 

What Spotify means for podcasters, SoundCloud for musicians, Etsy for artists and YouTube for content creators, Academia is inspiring the world's academics to have their work read and cited. Academia is adding 30,000-60,000 papers each day and has 28 million monthly visitors. Academia's algorithms make about 20 million paper recommendations a day, connecting users to content from 42 percent of the world's faculty in over 16,000 universities, including Oxford, MIT, Cal-Berkeley and NYU.

Across physics, chemistry, biology, health sciences, ecology, earth sciences, cognitive science, mathematics and computer science, teachers, doctors, business people and engineers can access Academia's wealth of current and historic content as well as get recommendations, enable citations, and publish their work to a global audience.

"Academia has shown that the academic world not only wants to share its research freely, but also that it's possible to build a new type of media business around this community and content," said Dr. Ling Ge, Chief European Representative at Tencent. "Readily accessible research papers will expedite the speed of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs around the world."

For more information about Academia and its mission to accelerate research, please visit the website at academia.edu.

About Academia.edu
Academia is the academic world's platform for sharing academic research papers. Academia has indexed over 32 million papers since the 1600s. Monthly, 28 million academics, professionals, and students read, share and get cited in papers accessed on Academia every month.

Academia is a venture-backed company with investors that include Tencent Holdings, Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures.

Media Contact
Consort Partners for Academia.edu: [email protected]

SOURCE Academia.edu