Mendeley is a desktop and web based bibliography management tool which helps scientists manage and annotate their research. It allows users to set up collaborative projects, share data and track real-time research trends.
The startup is targeting the 145m academic/corporate researchers, consultants and students worldwide, potentially disrupting the £11.90 billion academic publishing market.
It was launched in January 2009 and is now being used by more than 1m researchers worldwide with the largest institutional user bases in Cambridge, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Imperial College London.
Mendeley was co-founded by Viktor Henning, Jan Reichelt and Paul Föckler in 2007 and is backed by the former executive chairman of Last.fm Stefan Glaenzer, the former founding engineers of Skype, and the former Head of Digital Strategy at Warner Music Group, Alejandro Zubillaga.
As of July 2011, Mendeley had 1,073,457 registered users worldwide and a database of more than 100m documents.
The main competitors are EndNote (Thomson Reuters), RefWorks (CIG), Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (ThomsonR) and Zotero.