Questions we get a lot.

Helikon Labs is an R&D collaboration platform that connects university researchers with industry partners. It searches 500,000+ researcher profiles, 34 million publications and 3.3 million U.S. patents to find partners, and helps you manage each partnership from first match to evaluation.

Sign up with your institutional or professional email, then follow the guided onboarding wizard: pick your role, add your institution and department, list your research expertise, optionally import your publications with your ORCID iD, set your collaboration preferences, write a short bio, and invite colleagues if you want to. The more complete your profile, the better your AI match quality. You can always update your profile later from the Profile page.

The Helikon Method is our framework for managing university-industry R&D partnerships, organized under the MUSE mnemonic: Match (finding and evaluating potential partners), Unite (forming agreements and governance structures), Steward (managing ongoing collaboration, milestones, and IP), and Evaluate (measuring outcomes and capturing lessons learned). Every feature in the platform maps to one of these four phases. The name comes from Mount Helikon in Greece, the mythological home of the Muses and a place of creative convergence.

The framework draws on peer-reviewed strategic-alliance research (Kale & Singh, Hoang & Rothaermel, Dyer & Singh), transaction-cost economics (Poppo & Zenger), and Helikon Labs' primary research presented at the R&D Management Conference (Flowers & Roadman, 2024), a multi-method study of digital transformation in university-industry collaborations. Each MUSE phase is anchored to a specific evidence base, cited inline in the product and on the landing page.

Absolutely. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers can create profiles, appear in discovery results, message potential collaborators, and join projects. The Free plan gives you access to AI match suggestions (4 partner matches per week), literature and patent search, messaging up to 10 new people per month, and 2 active projects. Many students use the platform to identify potential industry sponsors for their research, find collaborators at other institutions, or explore career opportunities in industry R&D.

Our matching engine compares your profile (your role, expertise keywords, bio, and institution) with the publications, patents, and profiles of researchers in the Helikon Research Graph, matching on meaning rather than exact keywords. Suggestions refresh weekly, and Partner Search matches researchers to any abstract or problem statement you paste in. Every plan sees the full match breakdown: sub-scores for research similarity, expertise overlap, recency, and citations. Free includes 10 AI collaboration analyses a month, and Pro makes them unlimited.

The Helikon Research Graph is built from open data: 500,000+ researcher profiles linked to 34 million publications from OpenAlex and 3.3 million U.S. patents from USPTO PatentsView data (now hosted on the USPTO Open Data Portal). Institution data comes from the Research Organization Registry (ROR). All of it is publicly available. You can add to your profile with expertise keywords, collaboration preferences, and additional publications.

The compatibility percentage (e.g., 92%) represents how well a potential partner aligns with your research profile. Higher scores indicate stronger alignment. Every plan sees the overall score and the four sub-scores behind it: research similarity, expertise overlap, recency, and citations. The AI-written explanation of why a match was suggested is capped at 10 per month on Free and unlimited on Pro and above.

Yes. The Discover page has Literature and Patents tabs on all plans. Search by keyword and filter publications by year range, venue, citation count, work type, and subject area, and patents by CPC subclass, year range, assignee, and status. Results link to the original source. Save any result to your saved items: up to 50 on Free, unlimited on Pro and above.

AI match suggestions refresh weekly. Free dashboards show 4 researcher and 4 project matches, and Pro, Team, and Institutional dashboards show up to 12 of each. Your role, expertise keywords, bio, and institution are what your matches are computed from, so updating them changes your next set of suggestions. New researcher suggestions also come by email, weekly unless you choose daily. You can also run unlimited on-demand Partner Searches from the Discover page on every plan. The Pro unlock is unlimited AI collaboration analyses (Free gets 10 a month, and the numeric sub-scores are free on every plan).

Go to My Projects and click "New project." Fill in the project title, description, collaboration type, required expertise, timeline, and budget range. Pick a template for your collaboration type to preset the paperwork, milestones, obligations, folders, and reporting rhythm, on every plan. Set visibility to Everyone (discoverable by all signed-in users), Organization (visible to members of the organizations you pick), or Private (invited members only). Free-plan projects are always visible to Everyone. Organization and Private visibility are available on Pro and higher. Once created, you can invite collaborators by searching for platform users or sending email invitations to non-users. Free users can have 2 active projects with up to 3 members. Completed, canceled, and archived projects stop counting, so finishing one frees a slot. Pro allows 10 projects with unlimited members. Team and Institutional have no caps on projects or members.

The platform supports nine collaboration types. Five are featured on our landing page: Sponsored Research, Commercial & Joint Development, Licensing, Advisory & Talent, and Student Programs. Four additional models (Investment, Non-Profit & Social Impact, Facilities & Resources, and Knowledge & Standards) are available in Discover filters and project creation. You choose the type when you create a project.

Yes. Each project workspace includes milestone tracking (with due dates, status indicators, and assignees), a shared file repository, an activity log, and a team member list. Milestones are unlimited on every plan. Every plan also gets the schedule tools: recurring milestones, checklists, watchers, payment milestones, a timeline, baselines, and phase-gate reviews. It also gets an obligations list with reminders, a budget with spending and an indirect rate, templates for each collaboration type, file versions and contract amendments, and a live quad chart with a health color and a CSV download. Pro adds timeline editing, the risk register, planned effort, saved status reports with PDF and PowerPoint export, earned value, and project deadlines in a calendar feed. Free includes 250 MB of file storage, and Pro includes 5 GB. Team plans include 25 GB storage. Institutional plans include 50 GB storage.

The Partnership Pipeline is a CRM-style Kanban board available to Pro and higher plans. It lets you track partnership opportunities through six stages: Lead, Initial Contact, In Discussion, Agreement, Active Partnership, and Completed. Each opportunity card shows the partner, project, next action, and notes. You can drag cards between stages, see a count on each stage, and export the board as CSV. Every card carries an audit trail of who moved it and when.

Helikon Labs uses TLS for all data in transit (1.2 minimum, 1.3 negotiated on every modern browser and API request) and AES-256 for data at rest. We host on standard commercial cloud infrastructure with industry-standard access controls. We don't sell user data. Your research data, partnership conversations, and project files are shared only with the people you choose and with vendors we contract for specific services, such as cloud hosting and AI processing, who may use it only to provide those services to us. Our AI providers aren't allowed to train their models on it. Our Privacy Policy describes each category.

Your full profile (institution, expertise keywords, publication and patent history, bio) is visible to other signed-in platform users, which is what powers discovery and matching. Separately, every account gets a public profile page at app.helikonlabs.com/u/your-handle. It's open to anyone and can appear in search results, and signed out it shows your name, title, institution, role, photo, and your publication, patent, citation, and project counts. It never includes your email address, your bio, your expertise keywords, your documents, or any project detail: those are visible to signed-in members only. Your email address is always private to you. Projects have three visibility levels: Everyone (any signed-in user can discover and view a summary), Organization (members of the organizations the owner picks), or Private (invited members only). Free-plan projects are always visible to Everyone. Private and Organization visibility require Pro or higher. Project details like compliance status are only visible to project members regardless of visibility, and files stay with members unless their uploader shares one more widely. Budget figures are visible only to a project's owner and admins, and each risk only to the people its author chose. Conversations and files are always private to participants.

We treat data protection as a product commitment, not just a legal one. Today that means TLS in transit (1.2 minimum, 1.3 negotiated in practice), AES-256 at rest, and least-privilege access controls on our infrastructure. For GDPR we act as a processor under Article 28 and a Data Processing Agreement is available on request. SOC 2 Type I is in audit with a target attestation of Q4 2026, and a dedicated FERPA program is in development. We hold no formal certification today. If your institution has a specific compliance requirement, contact us and we'll share exactly where we are on the path toward it.

Every plan, Free included, can request a complete data export (profile, settings, affiliations, follows, saved items, projects you own, messages you sent, meetings you organized, and your activity feed) or permanent account deletion from Settings → Data & account. The export also includes the milestones on projects you own or that are assigned to you. Every member of a project can also download the project as a CSV from its Reports tab, on every plan. Pro and higher can also export their saved-items portfolio and their partnership pipeline as CSV files from inside the app. Account deletion is permanent and cannot be reversed. Your publication and patent records remain in the public research index and aren't affected. We recommend exporting your data first.

The Free plan includes: full profile creation and discovery visibility, 4 AI match suggestions per week, unlimited Partner Searches, literature and patent search (unlimited), messaging up to 10 new people per month with unlimited replies in existing conversations, 5 meetings per month, 50 follows, 50 saved items, 2 active projects (3 members each, unlimited milestones), 250 MB file storage, activity feed access, your top 3 funding calls matched to your profile with a weekly funding email, and 3 past awards beside each funding call. You'll see the overall match score and its full sub-score breakdown, plus 10 AI collaboration analyses a month. Unlimited analyses are the Pro upgrade. Free projects are public to other members, and private projects need Pro. Every Free project also gets the schedule and timeline, phase-gate reviews, obligations, a budget, templates, file versions, and a live quad chart with a health color, and meetings can repeat as a series.

Pro is $29/month, $69.60/quarter (20% off), or $243.60/year (30% off). You enter a card at checkout and the first period is charged straight away, and it renews automatically until you cancel. Pro gives you 12 AI partner matches a week with unlimited AI collaboration analyses, 50 meetings per month, the Partnership Pipeline, private projects, and CSV data export. On projects you own, it adds timeline editing, the risk register and planned effort, saved status reports with approval and PDF and PowerPoint export, and earned value, for everyone on the project. On the Funding tab it matches every open call to your profile, saves your searches with weekly alerts, and keeps your deadlines current in a calendar feed that also carries your project deadlines. Cancel anytime, and you keep Pro to the end of the period you paid for, then revert to Free with no data lost. There's no trial, because the Free plan is permanent and needs no card: evaluate the matching there for as long as you like.

Team is $19 per seat per month, $45.60 per seat per quarter (20% off), or $159.60 per seat per year (30% off), for 5 to 25 seats. You buy it for your organization: the person who buys it pays for every seat, manages billing, and invites the people who use the seats. Each seat gets everything in Pro, plus the shared team pipeline and team projects, a shared funding list for your organization, unlimited projects, messaging and meetings, and 25 GB of storage shared by the team. The team's owner and admins also get a team analytics dashboard. You enter a card at checkout and the first period is charged straight away. If you already pay for Pro, you switch that plan to Team instead of buying a second one. If the plan ends, everyone keeps their account and goes back to their own plan.

Institutional plans open soon. They're priced by seat count and billed annually, starting at 25 seats (from $4,000/year): $160 per seat per year at 25–75 seats, $125 per seat at 76–200 seats, and $120 per seat at 201+ seats, with custom quotes for large deployments. Institutional-exclusive features include: compliance dashboard, department analytics with roll-up reporting, contract template library, and a dedicated account manager. Contact our sales team for a custom quote.

Yes. You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel from Settings → Subscription at any time. If you downgrade from Pro to Free, you retain Pro features until your current billing period ends. Your profile, projects, conversations, and files are preserved, and you'll just have reduced limits on new actions. Switching from monthly to quarterly or annual billing gives you a prorated credit. Quarterly billing saves 20% and annual billing saves 30% on both Pro and Team.

Technology transfer offices will be able to use the Institutional plan, opening soon, to manage partnerships across departments: a shared Partnership Pipeline of active and prospective partnerships, a compliance dashboard for NDA, IRB, and contract status, department-level reporting, and seat management. Until it opens, a TTO of 5 to 25 people can share one pipeline on the Team plan. Contact us to hear when Institutional opens.

Yes, once Institutional plans open (soon). They support department-wide onboarding with seat-based pricing, and a dedicated account manager helps with bulk user setup and training sessions. Until then, a group of 5 to 25 can use the Team plan, and anyone can evaluate the platform on the Free plan, which is permanent and needs no card.

Not yet. You can add your ORCID iD during onboarding or on your Profile page, and we use it to find your author record in OpenAlex and import your publications from it without manual entry. It isn't a connection to your ORCID account: the iD appears on your profile as you entered it, we don't verify that you own it, and you can't sign in with ORCID. You can update or remove your ORCID iD at any time.

Use Partner Search on the Discover page and describe your R&D challenge in plain language, or paste an abstract, and set Show researchers at to Universities and institutes. It searches 500,000+ researcher profiles for relevant expertise, publications, and patents. To browse instead, the Researchers tab filters by field, country, organization, and h-index. Each result shows a match score, expertise tags, and publication and patent counts. Every plan sees the full match breakdown, and Pro adds unlimited AI collaboration analyses and unlimited saves.

Yes. The Partnership Pipeline (Pro and higher plans) provides a Kanban board to track opportunities from Lead through Active Partnership to Completed. Industry users commonly use it to manage multiple university relationships at once: tracking which researchers they've contacted, which partnerships are in negotiation, and which are actively producing results. The pipeline supports CSV export for integration with your CRM, and each stage shows how many cards are in it.

On Pro and above, project visibility controls let you restrict access to invited team members only (Private) or to the organizations you pick (Organization). Even on projects visible to Everyone, compliance status and files are member-only unless a file's uploader shares it more widely, and budget figures are visible only to the project's owner and admins. The Institutional plan, opening soon, includes a contract template library with standard NDA, MTA, SRA, and IP assignment agreements. File sharing within projects uses the same encryption as the rest of the platform. We recommend establishing an NDA before sharing sensitive R&D data through any channel.