RefME

RefME was an educational technology company that provided a multi-platform tool to automate the citation, referencing, and bibliography process for students and researchers. The company was founded in London in 2014 by Tom Hatton, Ian Forshew, and Tom Gardiner. Hatton, who is dyslexic, was inspired to create the tool due to his own frustrations with the complexity and time-consuming nature of citing sources while he was a student at Oxford Brookes University. After graduating, he worked in the creative industries, promoting artists like Adele and Radiohead, before launching RefME.

The business operated in the EdTech market, primarily serving students and academic institutions. Its core product was a free citation management tool that allowed users to automatically generate citations by scanning book and journal barcodes with a smartphone, clipping web sources via a browser extension, or searching by title or author. The platform supported over 7,500 citation styles, including APA, MLA, and Harvard. All work was synchronized to the cloud, enabling access and collaboration across various devices, including a web platform, iOS and Android apps, and a Google Chrome extension. The business model was initially based on providing the core citation service for free to build a large user base, which grew rapidly to over a million users within its first year. In 2016, RefME introduced premium, subscription-based tiers called RefME Plus for individuals and RefME Institute for universities. These paid plans offered advanced features such as a Microsoft Word plugin, the ability to turn photos of text into digital quotes (OCR), and institutional data analytics.

The company achieved significant milestones, including securing a $5 million seed investment from GEMS Education in April 2015. It was recognized with several awards, such as being named The Guardian's Startup of the Year in 2014 and the Best British Mobile Startup at the Mobile World Congress in 2015. In February 2017, the education technology company Chegg, Inc. acquired RefME. Following the acquisition, RefME was shut down on March 7, 2017, and its user accounts and services were merged into Chegg's existing citation tool, Cite This For Me.

Keywords: citation management, reference automation, bibliography generator, academic research tool, EdTech, Tom Hatton, Chegg acquisition, Cite This For Me, referencing software, barcode scanning citation, educational software, student productivity, academic writing, research tool, digital education, cloud-based citation, multi-platform tool, university software, student research, academic integrity