Samsung backs scientific AI bot for students and academics

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

The Seoul-headquartered AI startup’s largest and fastest-growing market is in the US, where it has 10 million users at universities including UC Berkeley, Texas A&M and the University of Southern California. The vast majority of paying users are in higher education, and about two-thirds are in the U.S., founder and CEO Luke Jinu Kim said in an interview.

Launched last year, Liner’s tool aims to be a more reliable artificial intelligence (AI) service than commonly used services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity’s bots. It limits its search to credible sources such as academic articles and government databases, and the company has access to a library of scientific journals and publications.

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

It uses generative AI, the same technology that helped build bots like Alphabet Inc.’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini, adapting large language models to assess the validity of information. Students can ask complex questions such as ‘what are the main literary arguments in Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy and what is their meaning’, or ‘How do you calculate the heat loss through a wall using the thermal conductivity, thickness and of a material? and temperature difference.”

The startup traces its origins more than a decade ago, when Kim and Chanmin Woo were still in college and created a browser extension to highlight only relevant results from Internet 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 (approximately Rs. 277 crore) to date, adding to its roughly 40-person global team with more positions in San Francisco.

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