The Brown Institute is proud to share that alphaXiv, a Magic Grant project from our 2024–25 cohort, has closed a $7 million seed round co-led by Menlo Ventures and Haystack, with participation from Shakti VC, Conviction Embed, and Upfront Ventures. The round also includes notable angels Eric Schmidt, Sebastian Thrun, Sara Hooker, and Gokul Rajaram, among others. Founded in 2024 by Rehaan Ahmad, Raj Palleti, Daniel Kim, and Lino Le Van, alphaXiv is building a platform that reimagines how AI practitioners discover and apply the latest research.
For the team, the journey traces back to April 30, when a Brown Institute award email arrived in a dorm room and set their project in motion. “The Magic Grant was the first money we ever won… we needed some proof of signal, and seeing that from the Brown Institute meant a lot and helped us bring in more,” said co-founder Raj Palleti. Since then, alphaXiv has grown from an early idea about comments on arXiv papers into a widely used reading and discovery platform that that has reached millions of users across both academia and industry.
The platform helps research and engineering teams keep pace with a field moving at unprecedented speed. Users can interrogate papers with AI chat, translate dense work into accessible blog-style summaries, and increasingly move from insight to implementation as alphaXiv expands toward a collaborative research workbench, bringing datasets, code, and experiment tracking into a single workflow. “There has never been a larger audience for research than today,” noted Sebastian Thrun, underscoring the demand for tools that bridge research and practice.
At the Brown Institute, we support innovation at the intersection of media, journalism, and technology. alphaXiv is a perfect example: in a year it leapt from a Magic Grant prototype to a widely used platform to advance how research is conducted and understood.
Congratulations to the alphaXiv team on this milestone!