Hello World!

Hello World!

I’m excited to introduce you to Valency. We’re building a home for people-centered, AI-accelerated research. Today we’re giving a sneak peek to Valency Bond – a new model context protocol (MCP) service that connects frontier AI models to a structured, embeddings-indexed corpus of the scientific record.

Why Valency Bond?

As scientists, we seek out every new opportunity to advance our fields, using state-of-the-art instruments, starting new collaborations, and leveraging new technologies. Galileo was scrappy in this way, famously co-opting the telescope (invented for military purposes) to study the heavens. In doing so, he ushered in the era of modern astronomy. As an astronomer, I think a lot about Galileo’s precedent as a deft and talented tool user.

Now, given the undeniable potency of AI, it’s natural for modern scientists to look to frontier large language models (LLMs) as the singularly most transformative technology of our lives. But while the LLMs many of us use in our personal lives are impressive, they haven’t matched the quality and depth needed professionally. Most researchers have caught (or not!) an AI confidently citing a paper that doesn’t exist. Moreover, AI models were trained on yesterday’s science—they don’t know what was published last week, last month, or even last year. When asked about recent or specialized work, they can hallucinate. And AI-generated content is already outpacing our ability to verify it.

Valency Bond is our answer to that. Think of it as the layer that helps keep the AI working from the real scientific record, not a plausible-sounding approximation of it. More viscerally you could think of it as the data artery that feeds the (LLM) brain. Valency Bond surfaces tens of millions of papers and preprints and grows daily, with coverage from 1965 to yesterday.

With 37 MCP tools, LLMs connected to Valency Bond are a powerful new venue for ideation, grounded in the real literature. With Valency, ask your favorite LLM for a few new research directions you might take or to propose some new collaborators for you on a topic you’re interested in. When I travel to other institutions, I’ve started asking Valency for help in finding deeper academic connections to the people on my meeting schedule and to identify those in other departments who might have intellectual overlap.

Early researchers in academia, government labs, and industry have been kicking the tires for a few months and getting some of the wow! moments that we had hoped for. Dr. Peter Nugent, Senior Scientist and the Division Deputy for Science in the Applied Math and Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), said “Valency has transformed how I approach literature discovery, compressing what used to take days of manual searching into a few targeted queries taking minutes. Having cross-corpus semantic search and citation graph tools in a single interface has meaningfully accelerated the pace at which I can move from a research question to a well-grounded reading list to scientific discovery.”

Why Valency?

This is a particularly interesting, if not singular, moment for researchers as AI permeates more and more of the scientific enterprise. We’re all navigating these potent changes afoot with varying levels of excitement and trepidation. My co-founder Ryan and I started Valency recognizing that the new era of AI-accelerated science is still, and will be, fundamentally, a human-centered endeavor. And as we all step into this world the tools and frameworks we use should allow us (and our AI agents) to continue to build on the shoulders of giants, with confidence.

Watch this space in the coming weeks to learn more about what we’re building, how we’re building, and who we are.

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If you’d like to try Valency Bond, please join our waitlist. I’m so curious to know what you’ll find—please get in touch.

-Josh
Valency CEO, Co-Founder