More than 4.5 million researchers have signed up for ResearchGate, and another 10,000 arrive every day, says Madisch. That is a pittance compared with Facebook’s 1.3 billion active users, but astonishing for a network that only researchers can join. And Madisch has grand goals for the site: he hopes that it will become a key venue for scientists wanting to engage in collaborative discussion, peer review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, and even upload raw data sets. “With ResearchGate we’re changing science in a way that’s not entirely foreseeable,” he says, telling investors and the media that his aim for the site is to win a Nobel prize.

The company now employs 120 people, and last June it announced that it had secured US$35 million from investors including the world’s richest individual, Bill Gates — cash that came on top of two earlier rounds of undisclosed investment. “It was really a head-scratcher when we saw that,” says Leslie Yuan, who heads a team working on networking and innovation software for scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. “We thought — who are these guys? How are they getting so much money?”