Market problem Researchers, students and professionals regularly need to read dozens of papers but have limited time. Across Reddit, HN and Twitter the recurring question “is there an AI that can summarise research papers?” appears every few weeks. Example threads:

• r/artificial – “Any AI tool that would summarize scientific papers?” (Mar-24, 350+ up-votes)
• r/PhD – “Recommendations for AI tool to summarise literature?” (Apr-24, 180+ comments)
• HN – Show HN: BulletPapers – ArXiv AI paper summariser (Nov-23, 140 points) This shows consistent pull, not a push.

Existing paid products (proof people pay) Scholarcy ($9.99/mo), SciSummary ($7/mo), Elicit (teams tier $20-30/mo), PaperDigest (from $6/mo), Coral AI (enterprise) all monetise. Scholarcy’s Similarweb traffic ≈1.3 M/mo and has been running since 2019, further validating willingness to pay.

Keyword data (Google) ‘pdf summarizer’ – 9 900 searches/mo, difficulty 18 (very low) ‘article summarizer’ – 12 100/mo, difficulty 35 ‘scholarcy’ (brand) – 3 600/mo, difficulty 14 ‘research paper summarizer’ – 390/mo, difficulty 35 ‘ai paper summarizer’ – 260/mo, difficulty 35 At least one high-intent keyword >500 searches with KD<30...