January 28, 2020 – Cactus Communications, a global scientific communications company, announced that it has acquired UNSILO, a Denmark-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) company that specializes in text analytics, linguistics, and data science.
UNSILO, co-founded by Mads Rydahl and Thomas Laursen, provides AI tools and solutions for publishers to grow their business and improve customer experience through products such as Classify which helps publishers package and sell content in new ways, Recommend which supports the discovery of new and existing research, and Evaluate which helps scale up the capacity of the journal editorial office. It has partnered with STM industry leaders like BMJ, Wiley, Clarivate Analytics, and Taylor & Francis to develop solutions for the publishing ecosystem.
Co-founder Mads Rydahl headed product design at Siri before it was acquired by Apple. Thomas Laursen, Co-founder and CEO of UNSILO, said, “By combining CACTUS’s scale and reach in the publishing and pharmaceutical industries with UNSILO’s text intelligence platform, we can advance faster and improve both quality and time-to-publication to the benefit of our customers.”
CACTUS has, in the past, developed proprietary tools and platforms aimed at the pharma and publishing ecosystem. Its author-resource management system is used by 3 million researchers worldwide and its workflow management portal handles over a million assignments a year. CACTUS’s complementary suite of products include Ada, an Automated Document Assessment solution to help publishers assess scientific content, and PubSURE, an AI-powered tool that evaluates a manuscript’s journal submission readiness.
On the eve of the announcement, Anurag Goel, CACTUS Co-founder and Executive Chairman, said, “CACTUS has evolved into a full-spectrum solutions provider for creators, publishers, and consumers of scientific content. AI algorithms will play a key role in helping us consume and make sense of rapidly increasing content. The acquisition of UNSILO allows us to increase the pace and quality of the AI products we are building for our target industries.”
Nishchay Shah, Chief Technology Officer at CACTUS and Head of Cactus Labs, said, “CACTUS has taken several steps to establish itself as a leading provider of machine learning and AI-driven solutions. I am very excited about this opportunity to work with the UNSILO team and further scale up the Cactus Labs team. For the next 5 years, our vision is to create technologies and products that will transform work through augmentation and automation.”
The acquisition is part of Denmark’s strategy to attract foreign investments and showcase Denmark as a frontrunner in exciting technologies. Maria Tarp, Director of Invest in Denmark (investindk.com), said, “The investment will fuel the growth and internationalization of the budding AI environment in Denmark. We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with CACTUS.”
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