companies

Litmaps

Citation-mapping platform that turns literature searches into visual, explorable graphs of related papers and authors.

Litmaps was founded in Wellington, New Zealand in 2016 by Kyle Webster, a molecular biology PhD candidate, and Axton Pitt, a neuroscience graduate turned software developer, after both ran into the same problem: navigating academic literature by hand is slow and error-prone. Webster took the CEO role focused on researcher needs while Pitt built the technical side as CTO, and the platform publicly launched in 2020. The company raised roughly NZD $1 million in seed funding in 2021 from Icehouse Ventures, Quidnet Ventures, and a group of angel investors, then closed a further USD $1 million round in 2025 led by UK-based Scholarly Angels. That 2025 raise coincided with Litmaps acquiring ResearchRabbit, a US-based rival literature-discovery tool, combining the two products' user bases into a company serving more than two million researchers at institutions including Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Cambridge. Litmaps' core product visualizes citation relationships between papers as an interactive map rather than a search results list, letting a researcher see which papers cluster together by topic, citation count, and recency at a glance.

Founded

2016

Headquarters

Wellington, New Zealand

Sector

applications