LONDON -- (BUSINESS WIRE) --
Sparrho, the science discovery and curation platform, today announced closing a pre-series A round of $3 million. The round was led by White Cloud Capital with AllBright and Beast Ventures. The new funding will enable Sparrho to grow the team and scale the platform globally, with particular focus on China.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170711006349/en/Based in London, Europe’s tech capital, Sparrho has a community of one million users across more than 150 countries including a strong network of PhD researchers in academia and industry, alongside students and citizen scientists. The platform’s growth in China has been rapid, with users increasing 20% month-on-month in the last quarter alone and reflecting the growth of Chinese scientific publications over the past decade.
Sparrho provides access to over sixty million research papers, patents and publications. Combining artificial intelligence and human experts, the platform helps everybody and anybody find, access and understand the latest science that matters to them - whether that be remote sensing in geology, the effect of nutrition on cystic fibrosis or how meal timing affects your sleep. To date, users have pinned and shared over 700,000 pieces of scientific content using the platform.
Innovation in scientific discovery and EdTech is much needed. While the internet has provided new access to information, scientific research remains largely gated, accessible only to those with subscriptions to academic journals.
Subscriptions can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year, putting the science beyond the reach of everyone bar those in the research community itself.
Dr. Vivian Chan, CEO and Co-founder of Sparrho said, “The appetite for direct access to scientific thinking has never been greater. Some of Sparrho’s most dedicated users in China are members of the public and their interest in science is often driven by their profession, personal interests or medical conditions. Enterprise is simultaneously looking for new ways to showcase its own science thinking and stay on top of its research landscape. Meanwhile, members of the scientific community commonly report feeling “siloed” in their area of research, and wish to communicate their work in new and dynamic ways.”
Isabel Fox, White Cloud Capital, said “Sparrho impressed us with its bold mission to disrupt scientific publishing, the calibre of its team and the platform’s unique blend of advanced machine learning and expert human curation. The company is also creating an entirely new economy of scientific expertise – accessible to the public and to enterprise. We’re delighted to lead this round and support Sparrho as it scales.”
Dr. Vivian Chan added, “Our investors immediately grasped Sparrho’s value in bridging these communities together - citizens, scientific researchers and knowledge-based companies. We’re delighted to have such a visionary board behind us as we move forward with our mission to make science more accessible, searchable and shareable.”
Notes for Editors
About Sparrho
Sparrho democratises scientific knowledge, making it more accessible, searchable and shareable. A blend of machine learning and expert curation ensures you automatically stay on top of the science that matters to you. Sparrho has attracted over one million users from more than 150 countries who search over 60 million pieces of content every day, making it the leading platform for the discovery, curation and dissemination of scientific research.
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Sparrho - discover the science that matters to you