We built the tool we kept wishing existed
Pilgrim started from the same frustration researchers everywhere share: reading is solitary, notes are scattered, and drafting feels disconnected from the sources it is supposed to be grounded in. We decided to fix that.
Research tools were built for filing, not for thinking
Nikhil and Leila met while both were working on text-processing infrastructure at a startup in the knowledge management space. They kept running into the same ceiling: the tools that existed were good at organizing things you had already decided mattered, but had no way to help you figure out what mattered in the first place.
The reference manager stores your citations. The notes app holds your observations. The word processor is where you eventually write. But there was nothing that kept all three in contact while you were actually doing the work. You would read a paper, write a note somewhere, and by the time you needed it the connection was gone.
Tobias joined after shipping multiple workflow tools for research-heavy teams and pushing hard for the same concept: the synthesis step has no tooling. Reading twenty sources and understanding each one individually is not the same as synthesizing them. Most tools stop at the individual source. Pilgrim starts at the synthesis.
We incorporated in 2024 and have been building in public ever since. The free plan is real. The synthesis view is the whole bet. We are funded by the work, not by a round.
Three people and a clear thesis
We are small on purpose. Every feature decision goes through someone who has spent time doing research the hard way.
Background in ML-driven text processing and knowledge infrastructure. Previously worked on AI systems at a document understanding company. Built Pilgrim because citation grounding in drafting had no good solution.
Specializes in distributed NLP infrastructure and large-scale text processing pipelines. Has led engineering for multiple text-intensive data platforms. Responsible for the synthesis engine that makes cross-source querying fast.
Decade of experience shipping knowledge management tools and researcher workflow software. Obsessed with the gap between the reading phase and the writing phase. Leads all product and user research at Pilgrim.
Join us in making research less painful
Free plan, no card. Or reach out directly at [email protected].