Labtiva Launches ReadCube – A Faster Way to Research Literature

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We’re super excited about BizSpark startup Labtiva’s official launch of ReadCube. ReadCube enables researchers to create and manage their personal content library, and discover new literature in their fields through an intelligent, personalized recommendation system.

Labtiva is a Boston Dogpatch Labs startup conceived in a Harvard College dorm room by co-founders Sinisa Hrvatin & Robert McGrath. Sinisa, a Biochemical Sciences graduate, and Robert, a Computer Science graduate, met as roommates in their freshman year. Over their time at Harvard, Sinisa was in the labs, seeing the problems that researchers had organizing & discovering research literature first hand. By their senior year, they’d started talking about ways they might use the technologies Robert was learning in order to meet the very real needs of life scientists.

In 2007, they founded Labtiva to realize their vision and soon began piloting ReadCube at Harvard and MIT. They’ve been able to use Sinisa’s contacts in the research community as he continues at Harvard, working towards his PhD in Biological Sciences, alongside running Labtiva. They took a very usage-centered approach, working closely with students, postdocs, and professors to create software that was intuitive to researchers and fit into their workflows.

And it paid off. Only 3 weeks after their official product launch on October 11th, they went from a couple hundred users at Harvard & MIT to thousands of users at over 300 institutions worldwide.  And today,  they launched the ReadCube Web Reader in partnership with nature.com as a companion to their desktop application. 

“We’re really proud of ReadCube. We’re working on an important problem and we’re having a blast doing it” – Nate Bernhard, Head of Operations at Labtiva & former Harvard dorm mate of Robert & Sinisa.

To see the ReadCube in action and learn more about it: https://www.readcube.com/ and the Web Reader: https://www.readcube.com/reader

See the press release here: ReadCube brings enhanced reading experience to nature.com.

Published: 11/2/2011 11:38 AM