The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally transformed the academic research landscape. Extended peer review processes, overwhelmed supervisors, and an explosive increase in research publications have created unprecedented challenges for researchers worldwide. Today, with AI contributing to an astonishing pace of academic output,two papers published every minute, researchers find themselves drowning in an ocean of information.
This information overload extends far beyond mere inconvenience, creating severe economic consequences. The research industry currently loses $10 billion annually due to poor study design, a staggering figure that reflects the real cost of inefficiency. Researchers who should be dedicating their time to creative thinking and hypothesis validation instead spend hundreds of hours on manual, repetitive tasks like paper searches and literature organization.
The situation is particularly acute for PhD students and early-career researchers. The pressure to meet degree requirements while producing high-quality research within limited timeframes continues to intensify. Traditional manual methods for literature review and analysis are simply inadequate for today’s research environment.
Enter Veritus, a startup developing an AI-powered research support platform designed to address these critical challenges. The company has secured $250,000 in pre-seed funding from Lifetime Ventures and aims to provide researchers with over 500 hours of annual time savings through its proprietary semantic search database containing more than 220 million research papers.
Solutions Born from Researcher Pain Points
Photo Credit: Veritus
The Veritus founding team represents a unique collection of individuals, all with extensive research backgrounds. CEO Manas Kala earned his PhD from Osaka University, where he also served as an assistant professor. His research focused on LiDAR technology, and he originally planned to launch a startup after completing his doctoral studies. However, the pandemic completely disrupted his research plans overnight, forcing him to explore new directions.
Subsequently, Kala gained valuable experience through a venture capital internship at Plug and Play Japan, where he interacted with founders operating at hundred-million-dollar scales and witnessed how quickly they moved compared to academia. This transformative experience ultimately led to the founding of Veritus.
COO Anh Ngo brings pharmaceutical industry research experience from Ono Pharmaceutical, where she worked on drug discovery after conducting life sciences research at Kyoto University. Founding UX designer Betty Lala is also a researcher who has conducted international research activities at Kyushu University, TU Berlin, and other institutions. Kala reflects on their shared experiences.
We all faced challenges, especially during COVID, like peer reviews took a lot longer. Our supervisors were sometimes busy or there was a lot of chaos. So we had to do a lot of research ourselves, finding papers, reading papers, writing hypotheses, that everything took a lot longer than we had planned. (Kala)
The team’s mission-driven approach stems from every member having personally experienced the problems they’re trying to solve. Regarding real-world research challenges, Ngo provides specific examples.
Forming hypotheses and building experiments to prove those hypotheses requires gathering massive amounts of data from other researchers and research groups. Determining what kind of data to gather, identifying reliable data sources, and designing appropriate experiments presents enormous challenges. (Ngo)
Traditional R&D researchers spend enormous amounts of time on literature reviews and data analysis, using data from other published papers and research groups to extract meaningful hypotheses. The literature review and data analysis components represent the first step of the entire R&D pipeline across industries, typically taking extended periods, sometimes years, to formulate and validate hypotheses.
This challenge extends beyond academia into industrial settings, particularly in pharmaceuticals. R&D departments need good data points to initiate experiments and formulate hypotheses, but identifying reliable data and constructing appropriate experimental designs requires enormous time investments. Veritus aims to streamline this entire process through AI support, dramatically reducing the time required for hypothesis formation and validation.
According to Ngo, challenges continue even after hypothesis validation. Next steps include determining which drugs to combine, identifying target patient populations, and building R&D pipelines around validated hypotheses – all requiring multiple steps where data and research remain key factors. Veritus technology has the potential to support researchers at every stage of this process.
From 12 Weeks to 2 Weeks: Achieving Remarkable Efficiency
Image credit: Veritus
Veritus automates three core research workflows: paper discovery, paper understanding, and manuscript analysis. Together, these functions enable researchers to achieve up to 500 hours of annual time savings while improving research productivity by 5x.
The Manuscript Analysis Workflow reduces manuscript review time to just 6 minutes while providing high-speed search capabilities for rapid information retrieval. These metrics derive from 6-12 month pilot studies conducted at institutions including Kyushu University and Osaka University.
The Kyushu University case study provides particularly compelling evidence. The process from students writing their first paper draft through internal revisions before submission previously required 12 weeks. With Veritus, this specific lab now completes the same process in just 2 weeks, a six-fold time reduction.
Current results actually demonstrate 5-10x efficiency gains, with some workflows exceeding 10x improvements, translating to over 500 hours of time savings. The 500-hour figure displayed on the company website represents a conservative estimate; actual results significantly exceed these projections.
This dramatic efficiency improvement relies on Veritus’ proprietary semantic search technology. While traditional search engines depend on simple keyword matching, Veritus employs advanced AI techniques that understand context and meaning. This enables researchers to discover truly relevant papers within seconds.
We calculated how long it takes a team to go from an initial idea to completing the literature review for their next paper, hypothesis, or grant proposal. Through three months of weekly interviews with Veritus, we measured the amount of time that could be saved. (Kala)
Actual pilot studies were conducted with multiple universities and research institutions in Japan, the United States, and India. While specific names cannot be disclosed, data gathered from these six- to twelve-month pilots forms the foundation of the company’s efficiency metrics.
The Veritus platform enables complete workflow integration, from document upload through note-taking, paper search, and analysis with cutting-edge science, all within a single platform. This eliminates the need for researchers to navigate multiple platforms, providing a consistent, streamlined workflow experience.
Zero-Error Philosophy
The AI research support tools market is rapidly expanding with numerous companies entering the space. However, Veritus faces a unique competitive landscape where 15-25 companies have entered the field, built solutions, and subsequently exited, a pattern that continues repeating.
This high attrition rate reflects a significant gap between superficial functionality and practical value. While combining PDF reading, semantic search, and agent construction can achieve 80% of basic functionality within a week, the critical factor is value delivery.
For scientists, the margin for error here is zero. Because that error compounds, it cascades. And before you know it, your $10 million project’s study design is ruined, because there was a gap in the literature review. (Kala)
While PDF-reading chatbots may suffice for students, scientists require zero error tolerance since mistakes compound and cascade throughout research processes. This understanding serves as the most critical guiding principle in Veritus’ product development.
Veritus maintains decisive technical advantages across several dimensions:
- Hallucination-Free Operation: The platform never generates non-existent information; every referenced information actually exists. Other applications might hallucinate information that doesn’t exist, but Veritus prevents this entirely.
- High-Quality Paper Filtering: The system excludes junk science, displaying only high-quality, relevant, and useful papers to end users.
- Integrated Platform Architecture: Everything from document upload through note-taking, paper search, and cutting-edge science comparison occurs within a single platform. Users avoid complex workflows requiring Foxit Reader for PDFs, Google Scholar and Web of Science for searches, ChatGPT for understanding, and separate platforms for final analysis.
Current focus concentrates on three workflows: paper discovery, paper understanding, and pre-submission manuscript analysis. This represents an appropriate market entry point. This focused strategy maximizes precision and reliability for each function, establishing a foundation for maintaining high quality when expanding to more complex features.
Veritus’ proprietary semantic search database contains over 220 million papers, with search engine construction and operation requiring $5,000-15,000 monthly costs. While receiving support from Amazon AWS Japan, the company self-funds search processing and database infrastructure costs.
This technological foundation enables instant delivery of accurate, highly relevant information that researchers actually need. The system can discover papers with deep relational connections that would be difficult to find using traditional search methods.
Global Expansion Effort and Strategic Market Approach
Photo credit: Veritus
Veritus officially launched commercial services seven weeks ago in May 2025 after formal incorporation in December 2023. Current deployments include researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Osaka University, Kyushu University, EMPA Zurich, multiple Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and advanced research institutions like the Systems Biology Institute (SBI) in Tokyo. The platform serves over 200 users across over 40 universities and institutes globally.
One unique strategic element involves beginning with academic sectors before ultimately expanding to industrial R&D departments. This represents a carefully designed strategy rather than coincidence.
Initially, the company considered industrial laboratories as primary target customers. However, as an early-stage startup lacking paid proof-of-concept projects worth tens of thousands of dollars, $10,000-15,000 investments wouldn’t make single pilot projects financially viable.
The chosen academic-first strategy builds credibility systematically. Academic goals typically involve scientific publication, remaining open until preprint stages, so researchers remain satisfied provided data safety, security, and privacy protections are maintained.
Academic and industrial laboratories share essentially identical core scientific processes. The company’s technology functions similarly for processing knowledge documents including papers, technical reports, protocol papers, and patents. Transitioning from academic to industrial markets won’t be plug-and-play simple, but won’t require complete market entry reconsideration either.
This strategy provides easy acceptance, high adoption rates, and autonomous purchasing decisions in academia, while enabling $100,000 annual contracts in industrial settings. Academic contracts typically range $2,000-3,000, but represent strong starting points for industrial R&D laboratory on-premise solutions.
The customer acquisition strategy identifies sweet spots between expensive on-premise solutions (potentially requiring 18-month sales cycles) and high-churn, low-retention B2C approaches. The company provides value to professors and researchers initially, then expands through their primary and secondary networks.
Marketing strategies combine inbound and outbound approaches. When newspapers like the Washington Post and Nikkei Asia published extensive coverage of AI peer review scandals, the company posted on LinkedIn to debunk myths and false information while demonstrating superior technology compared to GPT and other generic AI solutions.
Recent posts doubled inbound traffic compared to the previous week. This approach successfully leverages industry topics and trends for organic reach expansion. Current campaigns utilize LinkedIn, email, and word-of-mouth outbound strategies.
Target goals include achieving $5,000-10,000 monthly recurring revenue (MRR), with plans to approach industrial R&D departments once retention rates, usability metrics, and promoter scores reach high standards. The company currently targets 100 universities and plans more aggressive sales activities including in-person events after reaching specific revenue milestones.
Research login experiences receive careful attention, with systems enabling academic researchers to easily login using institutional emails. Password memorization isn’t required; academic email enables one-click sign-in. The company prioritizes positioning within researcher workflows and plans continued integration with tools like Zotero, Overleaf, data science platforms, and AI agent tools.
Okinawa Challenges and Funding Strategy
Veritus was selected for the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Innovation Accelerator Program’s “Bioconvergence Track” in 2024. This highly competitive program selected just 4 teams through rigorous 3-stage selection from applicants across 23 countries.
Lifetime Ventures investors encountered Kala during his Plug and Play experience and recommended applying to the OIST accelerator for access to top-tier researchers. The OIST experience provides significant value for the company’s technology development and researcher community networking.
As an Indian entrepreneur launching a startup in Japan, Kala faced unexpectedly complex challenges while discovering surprising advantages in the Japanese market. Kala explains about the entrepreneurial challenges in Japan.
Every year, I lose five weeks of productivity navigating bureaucratic processes like credit card applications and immigration procedures. These are burdens that slow progress.
However, Japan’s deep research sectors attract diverse, highly talented international researchers. Our founding team is all Japan-based, consisting of people who have directly experienced the problems we’re solving,” he adds about the unexpected advantages.
Kobe has a strong international startup community, and its government-backed initiatives helped us navigate the company setup process smoothly. (Kala)
The company has completed a $250,000 pre-seed funding round from Lifetime Ventures and an additional $30,000 angel investment round from investors in Silicon Valley, ETH Zurich, and India. The raised capital is primarily allocated to product development, collaboration with advisors and external teams, and the construction and operational costs of search engines that require $5,000-15,000 monthly.
Particularly noteworthy is that the company invests 15% of its expenditures in team skill development. They encourage learning for all members, including those participating as contractors and interns. Additionally, they bring in advisors from Google, Amazon, and other startups for guidance. One of Veritus’s missions is to ensure that anyone who joins Veritus can develop their skills.
Currently, what the company needs most is expanding networks with researchers and professors. They aim to increase awareness of their platform through introductions to researchers and professors not only in Japan but around the world. Additionally, they are actively seeking connections with venture capitals and startup ecosystems in preparation for a seed round planned for the end of the year.
Beyond fundraising, Veritus continues to gain recognition through selective accelerator programs. The company has been accepted into multiple prestigious initiatives, including the current J-StarX Silicon Valley Extended Program 2025 by 500 Global. These programs provide valuable access to international networks and mentorship that support the company’s global expansion strategy.
Growthstock Pulse 
