Helikon Labs Launches R&D Collaboration Platform for University-Industry Partnerships

Helikon Labs opened its collaboration platform for university-industry research and development (R&D) partnerships. Enter a research problem and the platform finds the researchers who have published, patented, and been funded to work on it, ranked across 500,000+ profiles. When a conversation becomes a project, manage it in one shared workspace. A permanent Free plan and a Pro plan are available today at helikonlabs.com. Team and Institutional plans open soon.

US businesses spent $722 billion on R&D in 2023 and funded $6.2 billion of research at universities (NSF, 2023). For every $100 a company spends on its own R&D, less than $1 reaches a university, while the federal share of university research budgets has fallen from nearly two-thirds in the mid-2000s to 55% in 2024 (NSF, 2024), and in 2025 more than 7,800 NIH and NSF grants were cancelled or suspended (Nature, 2026).

Universities need research funding that does not depend on one federal budget. Companies, which spend 6% of their R&D on basic research (NSF, 2023), need that science to remain competitive. And the partnerships that could serve both are still slow to form and hard to run: a typical sponsored research agreement takes three to six months to negotiate (UIDP, 2022), roughly two-thirds of disclosed university inventions never become commercial licenses (AUTM, 2020), and the project records of milestones, files, and agreement dates end up scattered across email inboxes.

The Helikon Labs platform matches partners from public research records instead of your existing network. Partner search takes an abstract, a specific goal, or an internal problem statement and finds researchers ranked by relevant expertise with a match score, the reason for each match, and an artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of collaboration fit. Track partner opportunities with a six-stage Partnership Pipeline from first contact to signed agreement. The company's four-phase Helikon Method (Match, Unite, Steward, and Evaluate) organizes program management with a repeatable framework.

"Universities are being told to find new sources of research funding at the same moment companies are spending record amounts on R&D. The funding and the science are a few introductions apart, but introductions don't scale," said Andrew T. Flowers, Founder and CEO of Helikon Labs. "We built our platform so a company can find the lab that's already worked on its problem in minutes, and so the partnership that follows has a record both sides can trust."

What each side of a research collaboration can do today, from one free account:

• Researchers find industry and academic partners and collaborators from what they have published, get funding calls matched to their expertise, and share their work.
• Industry R&D teams scout university and corporate research from a problem statement, map a technology area by who publishes, patents, and is funded, and track their pipeline in the same place. Startups can find a university partner for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) proposal.
• Research offices and technology transfer offices (TTOs) find the right expert inside their own or other institutions, and find industry prospects for a disclosed technology.
• Students and postdocs compare advisors and labs by publications, patents, and funding, look for career mentors, and post a thesis or capstone where sponsors can search.
• Investors and advisors read a founding scientist's publications, patents, funding history, and the patents that cite their papers for due diligence.

Step-by-step walkthroughs at helikonlabs.com/use-cases show the real screens to complete each of these tasks. The Free plan requires no credit card, and includes researcher suggestions, AI match analysis, funding matches, project management, and unlimited search and browse of the Helikon Research Graph.

Pro, at $29 a month, adds unlimited AI match analysis, private projects, and the Partnership Pipeline. Team ($19 per seat per month) and Institutional (from 25 seats) open soon.

The Helikon Research Graph is built from open data (OpenAlex, Crossref, USPTO, ROR, Grants.gov, and funder award databases): 500,000+ researcher profiles, 34 million publications, 3.3 million granted US patents, and $30 billion in funding opportunities. Sign up at helikonlabs.com.