The start of a new chapter: Digital Science acquires Writefull
We’re excited to announce that Writefull has been acquired by Digital Science, an AI-focused technology company providing innovative solutions for the research ecosystem. With this acquisition, Writefull has joined Digital Science’s portfolio of companies, including Altmetric, Dimensions, Overleaf, Figshare, and others.
Writefull and Digital Science’s history
The very first version of Writefull was launched about 10 years ago. Since then, we’ve always been an independent startup with a small (but dedicated and highly specialised) team–but we’ve grown with the support of Digital Science.
In 2016, we won Digital Science’s Catalyst Grant, which allowed us to continue pushing our products and reach. Two years later, we raised an investment from Digital Science, which then became part-owner of the company. It was also around this time that we launched Writefull for Overleaf, an extension for the LaTeX editor of our sister company Overleaf.
Over the last years, we’ve become the front-runner in the area of AI language services for research. While Writefull is renowned for its high-quality language check, we offer a wider range of AI-driven services to institutions, publishers, and other enterprises to facilitate and automate tasks. Most of these are language-related, like copy editing and language quality evaluation, but some apply AI to other tasks, like the validation of manuscript metadata. All of these services closely align with Digital Science’s vision of a trusted, frictionless, and collaborative research ecosystem.
What this acquisition might mean for you
Whether you’re a student, librarian, publisher, copyeditor, or other type of Writefull customer, nothing will change for you. Writefull will keep providing the services you know, as you know them. People on the team aren’t going anywhere, our servers are staying where they are and, of course, we will continue treating your data as we do now: securely, confidentially, and without storing your texts or language suggestions.
With Writefull being part of Digital Science, we have an exciting future ahead of us, one that will surely witness integrations with some of the other portfolio solutions.
Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science:
“At Digital Science, we’ve been impressed with Writefull’s AI language capabilities since day one. We believe their technology is currently state-of-the-art in language quality evaluation, cost and scalability, as evidenced by multiple customers. While the broader focus is currently on LLMs, Writefull’s small, specialised models offer more flexibility, at lower cost, with auditable metrics.
“Writefull will be an ideal addition to what we call our Collaboration Hub within Digital Science – collaborative solutions that are tailored to the customer experience. This means we’ll further develop Writefull’s ability to provide outstanding language services to customers, while integrating it seamlessly with some of our other solutions, including Dimensions and Dimensions Research Integrity. The overall impact will be to provide a transformative service to academics and researchers, institutions and publishers worldwide.”
Juan Castro, CEO and co-founder at Writefull:
“What began as an idea to help improve academic writing for researchers from non-English-speaking backgrounds has now become a comprehensive service used by academics, researchers and publishers all around the world – not just for copy editing but also to help publishers with manuscript categorization, structural checks and metadata extraction.
“We couldn’t be happier with Writefull’s journey. We are proud of the breakthroughs we’ve made over recent years in the use of AI language models to support our customers, and now we’re excited about what is to come next under the full ownership of Digital Science.”
Contact us
Do you have any questions, or do you just want to congratulate the Writefull team? We’d love to hear from you! Please write to us at press@writefull.com.