Find the
Unkwn
The navigational layer for scientific discovery. Map the negative space of knowledge: unexplored combinations, untested hypotheses, and terminology that makes relevant work invisible.
Mapping the Negative Space of Science
We're building the first platform that maps the negative space of scientific knowledge. The unexplored combinations, the untested hypotheses, the terminology that's drifted so far that relevant work becomes invisible.
We will become the navigational layer for scientific discovery. Helping researchers, R&D teams, and funders identify where the highest-value unexplored territory lies.
You Can't Search for Words You Don't Know
I had a grad student do a thesis that surprised me was a novel idea. She did a lit search, I did a lit search, and a collaborator did a lit search. We could not find where anyone had done this before.
Then, while looking for something completely different, I found papers from the 80s where they studied this. They just called it by a different name.
Professor sharing their experience
Three experienced researchers. Three independent searches. Still missed it.
The same concept gets different names across:
Time periods
1980s terminology vs. 2020s terminology
Disciplines
What chemists call X, physicists call Y
Geographies
Russian research from the 1800s, untranslated
Subfields
Even within the same discipline, vocabulary diverges
Current tools can't help because keyword search requires you to already know the keywords. You can't search for terms you don't know exist.
The Result
Researchers waste months on projects that duplicate existing work
Novel theses turn out to be rediscoveries
Relevant work stays buried because the terminology changed
The “Existence Bias” in Research Tools
Every scientific search tool is optimized to find what EXISTS. None are designed to find what DOESN'T exist.
The Pain
of published research replicates known work
spent on literature review to validate novelty, often incompletely
invested in redundant research because funders can't see what's been tried
Current Workarounds
Read hundreds of papers and hope you don't miss anything
Ask senior researchers who "just know" the field
Check review papers' "future directions" sections (often outdated)
Guess and hope you don't get scooped
The Silo Problem (Cross-Domain Blindness)
Breakthrough discoveries often come from applying methods from Field A to problems in Field B. But researchers rarely read outside their discipline, and there's no system to surface these opportunities.
Examples of Cross-Domain Breakthroughs
CRISPR
Bacterial immune system
→Gene editing
mRNA vaccines
Cancer research
→Infectious disease
AlphaFold
ML
→Structural biology
Transformers
NLP
→Vision, drugs, weather
The Pain
Researchers don't know what they don't know
Methods that could solve their problem exist, just in a different field
The terminology barrier makes cross-domain discovery nearly impossible
Find the Unkwn
Join researchers who are discovering the gaps others missed.
Get Started for Free