Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital Invest in ResearchGate to Advance Scientific Innovation Through Open Science - MarketWatch

"ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists, today announced a new investment from Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital with participation from Dragoneer Investment Group, Thrive Capital and the company's existing investors Benchmark and Founders Fund. Backed by this growth investment of 35 million USD, ResearchGate will continue to lead the research community into the open science era by removing archaic silos of science to intelligently connect scientists, data and resources. 'Our goal is to free knowledge from the ivory tower, to digitalize it and make it accessible for everyone in order to accelerate scientific progress,' said Ijad Madisch, co-founder and CEO of ResearchGate. 'With Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital, we're excited to add to our group of investors whose goals are perfectly in line with ours, and who understand the relevance of what we are doing - not only for science, but for society. To ensure everyone has the possibility to lead a healthy and productive life, science has to come up with new solutions to eradicate diseases and spread new knowledge quickly and effectively. We are building the digital infrastructure to make this happen.' The new financing will help spur further innovation in the fields of sharing and searching for scientific data online, including raw data and data from failed experiments. ResearchGate is also improving the way scientific reputation is measured. "ResearchGate not only has the opportunity to influence the trillion dollars spent yearly on research and development but - through scientific breakthroughs enabled by the network's knowledge share - impact the world as a whole," said Tenaya Capital Managing Director Ben Boyer. 'Just as I witnessed at LinkedIn and Facebook, a true network effect business like ResearchGate has the power to change the world,' said Benchmark General Partner Matt Cohler, who led the Series A investment and is a member of the board. 'With ResearchGate's growing network of more than 2.9 million members, we are just beginning to see the transformative impact of removing the arcane barriers to scientific collaboration and sharing. We're thrilled to welcome Bill Gates and Tenaya as ResearchGate enters its next phase of growth.'"