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RefME Aims to Take the Search out of Research; Announces $5M in Seed FundingNEW YORK and LONDON, April 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- RefME, the free tool to generate citations, reference lists and bibliographies in a single click, today announced it has secured a $5 million seed funding round. GEMS Global, the Varkey Group owned, largest private K-12 education company in the world, led the round with $4 million in financing. RefME is interested in vertical search and fueling the knowledge economy. The company will use the funding to invest in its engineering and data teams, and to scale its global presence. Available at RefME.com or via iOS and Android apps, RefME allows students and researchers to create citations and bibliographies in a matter of seconds. Students simply scan book and journal barcodes using their smartphone or use the online search feature to reference anything in a click. It automates citations in more than 7,000 academic formats, and saves and syncs the reference in the cloud, enabling students to manage their work across multiple devices. View a video demo of how RefME works at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgnO09KBdpg. "RefME has huge potential to disrupt education, publishing and ultimately search as well. RefME learns what students and researchers all around the world discover and has the power to share this information. RefME has built a tool that helps validate information and ultimately shows where you've found knowledge. This is as important to education as it is to the Web itself, and that is very compelling!" said Sunny Varkey, renowned education entrepreneur and Group Chairman and Founder of GEMS Education and Founder of Varkey Foundation. Launched in January 2014, RefME is growing by an average of 10,000 new users every day. The platform has gained more than 800,000 users in less than a year – overtaking Spotify and eBay in the download charts and growing faster than Twitter and Pinterest did in their first years. RefME's technology is not only winning over students, but academics as well. Universities spend millions each year on textbooks, but currently have no way to see which sources are cited in students' work. RefME provides this valuable information for the first time removing the guesswork out of which sources are most useful to students. "We set out to create a world-class tool that automates an important, albeit time-consuming, problem that 150 million students face globally," said Tom Hatton, CEO and co-founder of RefME. "We've been blown away by the uptake of RefME, but what truly excites us is what we're learning from our data, and the enormous potential our platform has moving forward. This knowledge, coupled with the seed funding, will allow us to expand globally and ultimately discover the true value of the RefME platform." RefME has a team of 36 working from its London offices, made up of former Morgan Stanley, Google, and Apple employees, as well as an ex-NASA data scientist. The company has also attracted a strong advisory board from two of the largest edtech companies in the world, and counts Will Murray, Chief Product Officer of iParadigm (Turnitin), and Sam Weber, Head of International Business Development for Blackboard among its advisors. RefME was also selected by the London Mayor's Office and UKTI (U.K. Trade and Investment) for a trade mission to the U.S., and was recently named a Startup of the Year by The Guardian. About RefME About Varkey GEMS Foundation Media Contacts:
Video - http://youtu.be/mgnO09KBdpg To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/refme-aims-to-take-the-search-out-of-research-announces-5m-in-seed-funding-300062664.html SOURCE RefME |