Tom Hatton
Tom Hatton founded RefME having struggled with the citation process as University. Diagnosed with Dyslexia, he found that the tools offered had a large learning curve and were tied to expensive institutional licences and ultimately not accessible. He felt that there should be an intuitive way to use advancements in mobile and cloud technologies to help students automate the citation process accurately and remove a pain point students all around the world have.
After graduating, Tom worked in the creative industries while continuing to shape his idea and seeking out investment. Along the way, he’s helped to develop TV shows, promoted recording artists such as Adele and Radiohead, and ran his own digital agency, where he worked with major brands like Domino’s. His proudest moment during that time was making the DomiCopter video – a pizza-delivering drone – go viral with over 1.6 million YouTube views.
When a Beta version of RefME instantly attracted over 30,000 sign ups, Tom along with his co-founders Ian Forshew and Tom Gardiner officially launched RefME in September 2014. Since then it secured $5M in seed funding from GEMS Global, and quickly expanded its London-based team to 36.
In its first year since launching, RefME grew at a faster rate than Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, with over a million users worldwide using its one-click functionality to produce accurate citations and bibliographies, scanning book and journal barcodes directly on their smartphones.
Tom believes that education utilities should free, giving students choice when it comes to the tools they learn with, and in making education a level playing field. His vision is to map RefME’s citation data to build a network to index, validate and connect the world’s knowledge, creating a platform that serves the needs of over 500 million students globally. He is an unrepentant workaholic, loves a good cup of English tea, and has a weakness for collecting nice guitars, six of which live at RefME HQ.