Litmaps’ tech transforms traditional methods for academic discovery

As someone who spent time in hospital as a child, research tech entrepreneur Axton Pitt developed an early appreciation for the power of modern medicine – and a corresponding determination to create meaningful impact through his work. But as is so often the case, what ultimately kickstarted his entrepreneurial journey was dissatisfaction – specifically, with the state of academic research software. “I was working in a technical scientific field and was frustrated by the tools that researchers had to endure to engage with research literature,” he recalls. “I thought that there had to be a better way.”

Axton and co-founders Kyle Webster and Digl Dixon set out to simplify literature reviews and significantly reduce the amount of time researchers require to understand an area of research. The result of their endeavours was Litmaps, an AI-powered research discovery tool that combines interactive citation maps, modern search tools and targeted updates to help researchers find and organise scientific literature more easily and visually.

Launched in late 2020, the platform takes the citation network of a particular paper or topic and presents this to researchers as a visual map or “Litmap”, in which each paper is shown as a dot and lines show how the papers are connected through citations. The innovative tech has transformed traditional methods for academic discovery. “We go beyond recommending relevant research papers by showing how they fit together with other papers in the field visually,” explains Axton. “Often researchers have a mental model of how key papers fit together in their head, and our tool lets them create a literature map that is a resource to build and to share with others.”

Litmaps boasts an impressive research database, including thousands of scientific journals such as Nature and The Lancet. “We cover the metadata for research papers published from 1400 to today,” says Axton. “This is roughly 270 million works published across all fields, from the humanities to sciences.” What’s more, the platform is hallucination-proof. “As our tools only work with or are trained on the research literature, we don’t have the ability to recommend papers that don’t exist or are blog posts on personal websites,” he explains. “Where we do use large language model technologies, we also validate that references exist in our research database. These approaches give confidence to researchers in how we produce results and that we are upholding data accuracy.”

The platform has the potential to protect research integrity, too – an increasingly critical issue confronting the academic research community.

From day one, the response to the venture was overwhelmingly positive. Axton was particularly proud to see Litmaps feature in Hacker News, a social news website that’s run by influential start-up accelerator Y Combinator and focuses on computer science, entrepreneurship and technology. “That was a cool piece of early validation for us,” he says. More recently, he was invited to speak at the 2025 Theory + AI Symposium at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario – further confirmation of Litmaps’ position at the forefront of research tech.

The venture is now poised for substantial growth, closing a $1m Series A funding round – led by UK-based investor Scholarly Angels – in May. “Scholarly Angels bring a wealth of knowledge and connections in research tech and academic publishing to Litmaps,” observes Axton. “This will enable us to refine our future growth strategies based on trends and build partnerships with key players in the industry.” The funding also enabled Litmaps to purchase rival research tool ResearchRabbit, enabling them to significantly expand their community of users. “We hope this leads to a number of opportunities to help users further, such as providing tools that support more of their research life,” he says.

These milestones are all the more meaningful when considered within the unique context of the research tech space. “There are many big challenges in building a start-up like Litmaps,” says Axton. He notes that Litmaps wouldn’t exist without the advancements driven by the Open Access and Metadata movements, which have made scholarly research more freely accessible and continue to support a more open and connected research ecosystem. But access to publishers’ data wasn’t the only hurdle. “Building search technology that scales to the full research corpus in a product that researchers love was a big challenge,” he remembers. “Finding a way to build a business model that works in our industry was even harder. Then getting the word out about the product was massively challenging for a technically biased team.”

Working with the right people has been key, he reflects. “We solved these issues by finding great people to solve problems, had lots of great advisors and mentors that opened doors for us, and had a lot of luck.” This “human aspect” is critical to the entrepreneurial experience, he believes. “More than anything, founding companies is about people – treating them as you would like to be treated,” he says.

For Axton, early entrepreneurial insights – and valuable inspiration – were also found in the Velocity programme delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). He participated in the programme several times over the course of his university studies (he completed a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Sciences, followed by a Graduate Diploma of Science in Computer Science at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland). “Seeing ambitious people like Peter Beck present their story was influential. I gained a lot from the networks of people in and around Velocity,” he recalls. “Also, getting turned down by competitions like the $100K Challenge increased my resilience and desire to make a start-up work!”

Over a decade later, that persistence has paid off – and in keeping with Axton’s early aspirations, the real-world impact of the platform now promises to extend beyond academia. Research commercialisation, for example, is “a big opportunity”, he says. By showing researchers how their work relates to patented technologies, Litmaps can bridge the gap between research and innovation, inspiring – and fast-tracking – new inventions or collaborations. It’s the meaningful outcome Axton always hoped to achieve. “Tools like Litmaps are supercharging the impact a researcher can make,” he declares. “By empowering academic and industry researchers, we hope to accelerate the impact of science on society.”