New app means students can create essay footnotes and references in seconds

As the UK continues its economic recovery, the Government is hedging its bets on where the next big growth area will be.

Educational technology, or “edtech”, is seen as a major area with untapped potential. UK education sector exports are worth £17.5bn a year, in a global edtech and e-learning market of $91bn (£60bn).

But the industry is expected to continue growing over the coming years, as many educational technology companies enter the market, hoping to fill the gaps in the developing industry.

Earlier this year, the Government led a team of the UK’s most promising start-ups in the sector on a trip to the United States, to explore commercial opportunities and build relationships with key enterprises and investors.

One of those was RefME, the firm behind a tool that allows students to create references and footnotes for essays and dissertations in a matter of seconds. The company claims to be one of the fastest-growing in the UK, and says it has grown quicker than Twitter and Pinterest in its first year.

RefME was founded a year ago but its flagship reference and citation tool was only released in October. Since then it has added between 5,000 and 30,000 users a day.

RefME is an app and online tool that crowdsources information to make the process of referencing work fully automated, the company claims. When compiling a bibliography, users take a picture of a book’s barcode or copy an article’s URL into the app, and references and citations are created automatically. RefME will also recommend other pieces of work that users might find helpful, based on the citation given.

Some 500,000 people now use the platform, with 100,000 users added in the past month alone.

The firm was founded by Tom Hatton in August last year, shortly after he graduated from Oxford Brookes University, frustrated with the current referencing system. “We’re building a tool that 150m students worldwide can use. We’re solving a problem that millions of students face on a daily basis – how to make referencing easier and simpler,” he says. “Our tool means you press a button and it does it for you.”

Co-founder Ian Forshew, a tech consultant who had previously worked with Spotify and Dell, joined the business in February this year.

Since then, the pair have raised £400,000 in funding and are poised to announce a multi-million-pound deal with a new investor, which they say will “be the direction the firm goes in”.

They say they are on track to gain up to 10m users in the next 12 months, and to reach a £100m valuation in the same time.

Ian Forshew and Tom Hatton

RefME has a team of 18 working from its offices in Shoreditch, made up of former Google and Apple employees and an ex-Nasa space scientist.

“The publishing world is about to go through a massive shake-up, just like the music industry did,” says Forshew. “Everything is going online. RefME is showing which books and articles people are looking at – not only that, we’re also giving the exact page reference and offering other suggestions based on their choice. Instead of getting thousands of search results, you’re getting a handful of pieces of information that you need to know.”

Many investors have said the education sector is a key growth market; and Edxus Group, a London-based edtech investment house, says the sector is under-exploited. “The share of digital in the total education market is only 2pc when it is 30pc to 40pc in other 'content’ industries, so there is a massive growth opportunity for e-learning ahead of us,” said founder Benjamin Vedrenne-Cloquet.

Edxus, founded last year, has pledged up to $77m to consolidate European e-learning companies, and boost UK investment in the space.

Forshew adds that the aim of RefME is to build powerful search tools that will provide much more targeted search results and a wealth of information for libraries, publishers and academics “that simply isn’t captured anywhere else.”

The app is free to use, and RefME plans to make money using three revenue models. First, by having a premium version of the app, the company will offer better facilities and storage space for about £6 a month.

The company is also talking to libraries about potential partnerships and licensing deals worth about £50,000 for each of the 1,000 universities in Britain.

Third, RefME plans to charge publishers a fee for pushing people towards their books and publications.

“The focus is to totally dominate the student market,” says Forshew. “Our target is 20m students by the following academic year. There’s demand for our product and we cater for 7,000 referencing styles to make it a global product. We’re opening offices in the US, Australia and probably India soon. There’s enormous potential for referencing tools.”