Petal, built by Paladin Max, Inc. and founded in 2018 by MIT graduate researchers, lets users chat with their own uploaded document library for sourced, traceable answers, alongside Petal CITE, a specifically free, cloud-native reference-management component built for academic research labs, university faculty, and industry teams.
That combination targets research groups managing a shared document and citation library over time, corporate R&D teams and university labs among its stated users, rather than an individual researcher asking one-off questions about a single paper, with collaboration and annotation features built around a persistent, shared knowledge base.
A free tier covers standard use, and paid plans start around $4 a month for more features. For a research lab or team wanting a shared, chattable document library plus a genuinely free reference manager, rather than individual per-document chat, Petal's lab-oriented, MIT-originated design addresses that team context directly.
