Amsterdam’s AI-based academic language service Writefull acquired by London’s Digital Science

London-based Digital Science, a company that claims to be advancing the research ecosystem, announced that it has acquired Amsterdam’s Writefull, which assists users globally with scholarly writing.

Writefull’s AI language models are trained on billions of sentences from millions of journal articles, offering assistance in academic writing, paraphrasing, copy editing, and revisions. The platform is committed to data privacy, ensuring a secure environment for users.

Writefull has been partially owned by Digital Science since 2018, marking Digital Science’s first major investment in AI language models.

Writefull’s AI helps you write, paraphrase, copyedit, and more

Writefull provides English writing assistance for researchers and supports publishers in streamlining submission, copy editing, and quality control processes. 

The company’s AI language models, trained on billions of journal article sentences, offer feedback to researchers, enhancing the precision and clarity of their texts. 

The service is used by over 1,500 institutions, integrated into workflows at major publishers like ACS, Hindawi, British Ecological Society, Sage, and RSC. Additionally, Writefull’s APIs are integrated with Digital Science’s collaborative LaTeX editor, Overleaf.

Juan Castro, CEO and co-founder of Writefull says, “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 categorisation, 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.”

Brief about Digital Science

Founded in 2010, Digital Science is an AI-focused technology company collaborating with researchers, universities, funders, industry, and publishers to address complex challenges in global research.

Their brands, including Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare, ReadCube, Symplectic, IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, Overleaf, Writefull, OntoChem, Scismic and metaphacts, aim to drive progress by solving problems collectively.

Aim of the acquisition

As part of Digital Science, Writefull has hinted at potential integrations with other portfolio solutions.

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science says, “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.”

“The overall impact will be to provide a transformative service to academics and researchers, institutions and publishers worldwide,” adds Scott.