We are pleased to announce that Molten Ventures has led a Series B funding round of $16.5m in Morressier, the Berlin-based startup transforming scholarly communications.
Molten led the funding round with participation from existing investors including Redalpine, Owl Ventures, and Cherry Ventures.
Morressier counts some of the industry's leading players in the scientific ecosystem as customers, including: IOP Publishing, AAAS, ASCE, APS, and Mayo Clinic. The company will use its Series B growth capital for continued product innovation, scaling its go-to-market activities, including the institutional and corporate market, and to expand partnerships with leading research integrity vendors.
Sami Benchekroun, Morressier co-founder and CEO: “Attracting such strong support from investors in this climate is the ultimate validation that Morressier is doing critical work. Science is experiencing an integrity crisis and this investment will help us to double down on our efforts to support academic societies, institutions and publishers in this fight.”
Morressier recently announced its Integrity Manager – available via workflows across its end-to-end platform as well as a standalone module – designed to protect research integrity at every step of the publishing journey. The company already offers scientific researchers a suite of pre-submission checks to ensure submission completeness, quality, and help comply with industry standards. Integrity tools are also being developed into Journal Manager, a state-of-the-art journal submission system under development, with IOP Publishing on board as the first major client.
Research integrity threats are a growing and evolving issue, with a study showing 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized. One in five articles published in journals may contain faked data produced by “paper mills” that are paid to fabricate scientific submissions, according to a study by German researchers who used new techniques to “red flag” problematic papers.
Othman Altalib, Morressier Chief Growth Officer: “Deepening our partnerships across the scholarly publishing industry is core to Morressier’s growth: it ensures that we remain aligned with and supportive of stakeholder needs. This latest investment is going to be of huge benefit to our customers and the broader scholarly publishing community, as we up the ante in the research integrity arms race on their behalf.”
Christoph Hornung, Partner at Molten Ventures said, "There is a massive need for a new infrastructure in the science world, and we are convinced that Morressier with its highly experienced team will be shaping the new structure of this industry in the following years."
Morressier has been actively strengthening its team since the investment, attracting a wealth of experience into key roles at the executive level and across the team, with a number of recruitment processes ongoing.