CLEVIA LTD

What CLEVIA LTD does

Clevia Ltd is a London-based, privately held software company that has built an AI-powered research workspace targeting academic and scientific users. Founded in 2025 by Álvaro Mota, the platform consolidates several typically fragmented research activities — PDF upload and parsing, citation verification against real records in major scientific databases, AI-generated structured summaries with article- and page-level source references, reference library organization, in-platform writing assistance, and bibliography export — into a single web application. The product is built on Supabase infrastructure and exposes capabilities through text and document modalities, with no public API or SDK disclosed. Differentiation rests on two productized claims: (i) citation verification that flags false or incorrect references before they propagate, and (ii) AI chat outputs that synthesize across uploaded papers while remaining traceable to original sources. The platform runs as a self-serve SaaS application served from app.clevia.ai.

Clevia monetizes through a freemium subscription model priced in EUR. The Free tier (€0) provides 1,000 AI words/day, 2 uploads/day, 100MB total storage, and serves as the top-of-funnel acquisition channel. The Pro tier (€14/month, billed annually) unlocks unlimited AI words, unlimited uploads, 150MB-per-file cap, unlimited storage, and priority support. The Team tier (€21/month, billed annually) layers collaborative editing, shared workspace, admin panel, dedicated account manager, and a shared database on top of Pro, with sales contact required. Distribution is primarily direct and product-led through the website, supplemented by event-driven exposure (Web Summit 2025, ALPHA 5 program, November 13, 2025) and community-led word-of-mouth via published testimonials from PhD candidates and researchers at named institutions. Marketing channels include a blog, public documentation (docs.clevia.ai), and a LinkedIn company page.

The customer base is concentrated in higher education, with institutional affiliations spanning the UK (Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, Imperial, UCL, King's College London, London Business School, Warwick Business School) and Portugal (FEUP, NOVA, Católica Lisbon, FEP, FMUP, Porto Business School), plus Harvard. The company is early-stage: 1-10 employees, no disclosed external funding, no public API, and a single named executive. Compliance posture includes self-attested GDPR alignment under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Operating geographies formally recorded are the UK and Portugal, though the website presents a global self-serve funnel.

Name

CLEVIA LTD

Legal name

Clevia Ltd

Website

https://clevia.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2025

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Clevia Ltd operates an AI-powered research workspace that unifies academic paper reading, citation verification, reference management, and writing for PhD candidates, researchers, and professors, sold as a freemium SaaS with paid Pro and Team tiers.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Academic Research Software

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

Research Administration & Grants Management Support (Pre/Post-Award, Compliance) (EDAEALAO)

akta.pro secondary industry

Digital Archives, Libraries & Institutional Access Platforms (MPAJAMAJ)

Keywords

• Academic research software
• Citation management
• AI writing assistant
• Research workflow platform
• Literature review tools

Headquarters

HQ city

London

HQ country

United Kingdom

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Subscription Plans: Clevia operates on a subscription-based model with three tiers: Free (€0/year), Pro (€14/month billed annually), and Team (€21/month billed annually). The Pro tier offers unlimited AI words, unlimited uploads, 150MB per upload, unlimited storage, and priority support. The Team tier adds collaborative editing, shared workspace, admin panel, dedicated account manager, and shared database features.
2. Freemium Tier: Free tier provides limited access with 1,000 AI words/day, 2 uploads/day, 20MB per upload limit, and 100MB total storage. This serves as a user acquisition funnel for converting to paid Pro or Team plans.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels2 records

Marketing channels5 records

Core offering

Clevia is an AI-powered research workspace platform that lets academics, PhD candidates, and scientists upload PDFs, verify citations against real records in major scientific databases, organize references with structured citation keys, generate AI summaries with source-traced references, write in-platform with AI assistance, and export bibliographies to LaTeX, BibTeX, Word, or PDF. The platform is delivered as a freemium SaaS product with Free, Pro (€14/month billed yearly), and Team (€21/month billed yearly) tiers, targeting individual researchers and small research teams.

Product overview

Clevia is a single unified AI-powered research workspace platform. The core product provides citation verification, research document management, AI writing assistance, and citation tools. The platform is offered across three pricing tiers: a Free tier (limited AI words and storage), a Pro tier (unlimited access with priority support), and a Team tier (adds collaboration features including shared workspace, admin panel, and shared database). All tiers share the same underlying platform capabilities, differentiated by usage limits and collaboration features.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Clevia Platform AI-powered research workspace SaaS platform that combines PDF upload, citation verification against real scientific records, AI-generated structured summaries with source-traced references, reference organization with citation keys, in-platform writing with AI assistance, and bibliography export to LaTeX, BibTeX, Word, and PDF. Designed for academics, PhD candidates, graduate students, professors, scientists, and research labs.

Quantifiable outcome

• Citation formatting time reduced from hours to seconds
• +2 more outcomes

Named customers23 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability5 records

Feature7 records

Scale indicators2 records

Recent moves4 records

Expansion highlights4 records

Broad incumbents

• Semantic Scholar: Semantic Scholar is an AI-backed academic search engine from the Allen Institute that indexes 200M+ papers with AI-generated summaries. It is a much larger free resource that Clevia effectively layers on top of, and competes for the same end-user search/query workflow.
• Mendeley: Mendeley (owned by Elsevier) is a reference manager and academic social network with PDF annotation and collaboration features. It is the established incumbent in the reference-management category Clevia targets.
• Zotero: Zotero is the dominant open-source reference manager used by millions of academics for citation collection, organization, and BibTeX export. It directly competes with Clevia's reference organization and citation export features.

Direct peers

• Consensus: Consensus is an AI-powered academic search engine that synthesizes answers directly from peer-reviewed studies and shows citation reliability signals. Like Clevia, it targets students and researchers seeking verified, citation-backed insights rather than generic web answers.
• ResearchRabbit: ResearchRabbit is a literature discovery and mapping tool for academics that visualizes related papers and authors. It overlaps with Clevia's paper-discovery and reference-organization layer for the same researcher persona.
• Elicit: Elicit is an AI research assistant that helps academics search, summarize, and extract data from peer-reviewed papers. It directly competes with Clevia's core research-workspace proposition for the same PhD/researcher persona and uses similar LLM-driven summarization workflows.
• Scite: Scite uses AI to classify how scientific papers cite one another (supporting/contrasting/mentioning), giving researchers visibility into citation trustworthiness. Its citation-reliability positioning most directly overlaps with Clevia's proprietary citation-verification differentiator.

Emerging players

• Litmaps: Litmaps builds visual literature maps from seed papers and tracks new citations over time. It addresses the same literature-discovery pain point Clevia targets, though with a more specialized visualization focus.
• Scite (formerly Scispace / Typeset): Scite's research workspace (formerly Scispace) provides AI chat over uploaded papers, literature review copilots, and citation tools. It is a near-direct product comparison to Clevia's AI chat + structured summary + citation pipeline.
• Connected Papers: Connected Papers visualizes academic papers as a graph of related work using co-citation analysis, supporting literature reviews. It overlaps specifically with Clevia's literature-discovery and reference-organization capabilities.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/clevia-ai

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about CLEVIA LTD