Digital Science Invests in London start-up WriteLaTeX

We are thrilled to announce that Digital Science has invested in London start-up WriteLaTeX, the company behind Overleaf.

WriteLaTeX was co-founded by John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller, two mathematicians who having worked together, were inspired by their own experiences in academia to create a better solution for collaborative scientific writing.

Launched in 2012, WriteLaTeX has grown rapidly to become an innovative provider of scientific writing tools. Its flagship product, Overleaf makes the power of professional typesetting immediately accessible to all scientists and technical writers at all stages of their career. Using a WYSIWYG manuscript editor Overleaf provides real-time collaboration for a live view of the final typeset output. Created with the goal of making science and research faster, more open and more accessible, Overleaf brings the whole scientific process into one place, from idea to writing, to review to publication.

The addition of WriteLaTeX into the Digital Science portfolio will afford the group increased opportunities to serve researchers, publishers and academic institutions. Digital Science already supports a suite of renowned researcher tools across a wide portfolio of companies across the globe, including ReadCube, Figshare and
Labguru. WriteLaTeX plans to continue to enhance the development of Overleaf to reach its ambitious target of one million users worldwide. The team of four will be based in Digital Science’s London HQ whilst having easy access to Digital Science’s offices and portfolio companies in the USA, Japan, Israel and Germany.

Overleaf’s rapidly growing service is already being used in more than 1,000 universities and institutions globally and has been utilised to create more than one million documents by users in over 180 countries worldwide. It already has more than 100,000 registered users worldwide. In July 2014, Overleaf was crowned Innovative Internet Business of 2014 at the Nominet Internet Awards held in London, representing the pinnacle of online innovation in the UK.

John Hammersley says:

“This is a great day for our team, and we’re all incredibly proud of what we achieved to get us to this point. Our focus has always been on developing tools for our authors, and this investment gives us the opportunity to ensure we are able to deliver a complete authoring solution for the scientific world.”

Timo Hannay adds:

“Science is increasingly asked to provide solutions to society’s most pressing issues and to do so, scientists need to be able to deliver results faster and in a way that is more open, trustworthy and meaningful to those outside the scientific community. We welcome WriteLaTeX into the fold and look forward to working closely together to change the way we support, deliver and measure scientific research.”