About us

Making science radically more accessible

Tek Def is an AI-native platform for scientific literature analysis. We help researchers, universities and R&D teams spend less time searching and more time discovering.

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Papers indexed

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Researchers

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Scientific fields

Scientists collaborating in a modern research lab

Our mission

Give every researcher — from independent scientists to global R&D teams — the same superpowers: instant summaries, deep analysis, and citation-grounded reports across any field.

Our approach

Frontier AI, tuned for science. Every output is grounded in real papers with real citations. No black boxes, no hallucinated references.

Biotechnology researcher inspecting samples
Our story

Born in the lab, shaped by researchers

Tek Def started as a side project between a biotech PhD student drowning in preprints and a former OpenAI engineer looking for a meaningful problem. Three years later, we're a small team of scientists and ML engineers working with universities and R&D groups in more than 40 countries.

We don't believe in gated science. We believe in tools that make the world's research easier to read, reason about, and build on — for everyone who cares about the frontier.

What we stand for

Principles that guide the product

Grounded in evidence

Every claim Tek Def generates points back to a real paper, page and quote. No hallucinated references. Ever.

Privacy for your research

Your uploads, drafts and outputs stay yours. We never use customer data to train models.

Built with scientists

Every workflow is shaped alongside PhD researchers, medical librarians and R&D teams in the field.

Universal access

Credit-based pricing means an independent researcher and a Fortune 500 lab pay the same fair rate.

Who we serve

Trusted across the research ecosystem.

Researchers

Cut months off your literature reviews and stay on top of a moving field.

Universities

Give faculty and students a shared, credit-based AI research toolkit.

Biotech & Pharma

Accelerate discovery with rigorous, citation-grounded analysis.

Startups & R&D

Move from question to insight without hiring a research team.

Journey

A short history

2023

First prototypes

A weekend project reading arXiv papers turns into a full-time mission.

2024

Beta with 12 labs

Early partners across biotech, materials and AI safety shape the platform.

2025

Public launch

Tek Def opens to researchers worldwide with credit-based pricing.

2026

2M+ papers indexed

Full-text semantic search across life sciences, physics, CS and engineering.

“Tek Def feels like adding a tireless PhD student to every project. It reads what we can't get to and shows its work every step of the way.”

Dr. Sofia Vargas

Head of R&D · Aurora Biosciences

12,000+ researchers40+ countries75+ scientific fields