We're excited to announce our investment in Afforai!

Afforai is an exceptional research powerhouse, harnessing the power of advanced AI to source, summarize, and translate information skillfully. Their mission is to empower researchers at every step of their journey, offering a seamless research platform ecosystem that caters to the entire research process from start to finish.

Establishing an initial connection with Plug and Play in Valencia, Spain, proved beneficial for them. After a few months, they received an email expressing interest from Plug and Play's investment team, leading to a meeting. Surprisingly, within just a week of the initial meeting, they sealed the deal by signing the SAFE agreement.

In academia, researchers often find themselves immersed in a vast sea of scholarly articles, either for their research or to stay updated with advancements in their fields. Researchers are expected to dedicate a significant amount of time, approximately 23% of their work time, to reading research publications. This translates to around nine hours per week or 432 hours per year.

The average hourly wage of a researcher in the United States is $25. Hence, reducing the time spent on reading publications can result in annual savings of $10,800 per researcher. This signifies that academic institutions have the opportunity to reclaim valuable time and productivity, worth around $11,000 per researcher per year. This time and productivity can then be redirected towards more high-value tasks, such as conducting research, writing papers, or publishing groundbreaking findings.

Meet the team behind Afforai

Alec, the co-founder and CEO, has a multicultural background with roots in Vietnam and Japan. He is proficient in three languages and played a key role in establishing a distribution network across Asia for his family's business. This contributed to an impressive seven-figure annual recurring revenue (ARR). During college, Alec developed research software that gained interest from a California State-sponsored non-governmental organization (NGO). The software is used for tracking, analyzing, and visually representing homeless statistics, providing valuable insights for policy reports submitted to the US Congress.

Hung, Afforai's co-founder and CTO, has a strong background in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He gained teaching experience by assisting professors in computer science during college. Coming from an entrepreneurial family in Vietnam, he has actively contributed to the growth of their business from a young age.

Why we’re excited to invest

Afforai possesses a distinct competitive advantage, stemming from the founders' intimate understanding of the issue researchers face when sifting through numerous papers for actionable insights. Moreover, the founders boast a wealth of prior experience in building, selling, and scaling software, further amplifying their value proposition.

Alireza Masrour, a General Partner in Investments at Plug and Play, expressed his enthusiasm regarding the investment. “We at Plug and Play are excited about Afforai not only because of the team but also for solving a big problem that all researchers have. Their traction shows the product demand, and we believe this is a great beginning to what the researchers have done for them to get to the mainstream, like the media content on social networks.”