Bill Gates has reportedly invested in a scientific social network

Guess who else is jumping onto the social networking bandwagon? Bill Gates has reportedly invested in a Berlin based company building a social networking website for the scientific community.

Gates is supposed to be one of the handful of investors to have pumped in money in a $20 million round in the company, ResearchGate. According to Wall Street Journal’s German edition, the company is supposed to be a network for scientists, helping them to find breakthroughs by means of working together. Doctors and biologists are supposed to be especially active on ResearchGate.

Social Network for scientists

Though the company has not made the funding and the amount involved official, German tech publication Gründerszene discovered the $20 million round through a U.S Securities and Exchange Commission papers. Gates and ResearchGate have both refused to comment on the investment. The company is already boasting of backers like Matt Cohler who has been associated with Instagram, Quora and Asana, David Sacks from Yammer, Founders Fund, which happens to be Peter Thiel’s investment company.

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ResearchGate is an initiative that Gates’ philanthropic side would be interested in. The company’s CEO and founder Ijad Madisch explained that he expected networking to aid advances in the scientific world. There has been enough data available regarding diseases and therapies since ages, he said and that the only thing that was lacking is proper networking to disseminate information. The site already boasts of over 2.9 million scientists and doctors. Gates could be happy providing whatever aid he can to help in scientific breakthroughs via his Bill and Melinda Gates Research Foundation.