The academic collaboration startup ResearchGate has picked up $ 20 million in equity-based funding, an SEC filing from last week shows. The news was first reported by the German startup blog Gruenderszene.
ResearchGate, based out of Berlin and Cambridge, Mass., is one of a handful of large academic social networks that is trying to help researchers around the world connect and collaborate. Another example is Mendeley, which got got bought by Elsevier (see disclosure) a month ago, to the consternation of many users.
ResearchGate has previously had A and B funding rounds, where we knew who was involved (Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners typically feature) but didn’t know the amount. This time, we know the amount but not who bought the equity.
While Mendeley is now part of Elsevier’s evil empire — we’re talking popular perception here — ResearchGate has more of a rebellious tinge to it. The company has a rather inspired approach to overcoming the copyright restrictions that so irk academics: having realised that researchers are allowed to publish their papers on their personal websites without breaking the copyright terms of the big academic publishers, ResearchGate tweaked its terms a while back so that users’ profiles count as their personal websites.
In other words, not only is ResearchGate a forum for connecting academics, but it is also increasingly serving as an open access repository for the sort of research that should, given the public funding that generally makes it possible in the first place, be freely accessible. Users can also share experiment-derived raw data with one another.
ResearchGate recently started trying to make money, offering the eyeballs of its 2.7 million users to recruiters and conference promoters. It’s a safe bet that the money raised in the last week or two will at least partly go towards boosting the company’s sales force.
Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.
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