Samsung Backs Scholarly AI Bot Serving Students and Academics

Liner, an AI search engine for students and researchers, has raised $29 million (roughly Rs. 243 crore) from investors including Intervest, Atinum Investment and Samsung Venture as it builds out its business in specialised information retrieval.

The Seoul-headquartered AI startup's biggest and fastest-growing market is in the US, where it has 10 millions users across universities like UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and the University of Southern California. The vast majority of its paying users are in higher education, and about two-thirds are in the US, founder and Chief Executive Officer Luke Jinu Kim said in an interview.

Liner's tool, launched last year, aims to be a more reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI) service than general-use ones like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Perplexity's bots. It narrows its search to credible sources like academic papers and government databases, and the company has access to a library of scientific journals and publications.

“It's a new type of search engine. There's no junk, only valuable information,” 33-year-old Kim said. The tool works across academic disciplines, from medicine to engineering, humanities and history.

It uses generative AI, the same tech that helped build bots like ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.'s Google Gemini, customiing large language models to weigh the validity of information. Students can ask complex queries like “what are the key literary devices in Hamlet's ‘to be or not to be' soliloquy and what is their significance,” or “How do you calculate the heat loss through a wall with a material's thermal conductivity, thickness and temperature difference.”

The startup has its roots more than a decade ago when Kim and Chanmin Woo were undergrads and created a browser extension to highlight only pertinent results from web searches. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, they took the opportunity to create a more disciplined chatbot that wouldn't suffer from hallucinations, Kim said.

Investors in the Series B round include LB Investment, as well as existing backers Capstone Partners and SL Investment, the startup said. It has raised a total of $33 million (roughly Rs. 277 crore) so far, and is adding to its roughly 40-person global team with more positions in San Francisco.

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