The platform helping academics cite 250m real research papers

This article is a part of Startup Spotlight, a series that features young, up-and-coming startups.

Photo credit: Jenni AI

When David Park launched Jenni AI in 2018 as a general writing assistant, he noticed an unexpected trend. Students and academics were using the tool to manage literature reviews and citations rather than just drafting text faster.

😟 Problem

Researchers lose enormous amounts of time to literature reviews and citation management. Meanwhile, generic AI tools create academic integrity risks by inventing citations and generating unsupported claims.

Detection tools offer no reliable solution to AI misuse, including: 

• Independent research reports that detection accuracy sits below 80%.
• One study found 61.3% of writing samples by non-native English writers were wrongly flagged.
• Around 13.5% of 2024 biomedical abstracts were processed with large language models.

💡 Solution

Jenni AI provides a research and writing workspace built specifically for academic work.

• AskJenni allows users to query PDFs alongside a database of 250 million external papers.
• AI autocomplete suggests text one sentence at a time to maintain user accountability.
• Automatic in-text citations link to real, verifiable sources in over 10,000 styles.
• A built-in research library syncs directly with Zotero and Mendeley.

Image credit: Jenni AI

📊 Market size

Universities are actively moving away from AI detection and toward disclosure and structured AI literacy.

This shift targets a massive demographic of roughly 250 million higher education students worldwide. The market also includes nearly 9 million professional researchers globally.

🤝 Team

• David Park. CEO and founder. He founded Jenni AI in 2018 and later pivoted it into a dedicated academic research and writing platform.
• Marc Astbury. CPO. He previously co-founded RandomDots, a Singapore-based remote team experiences platform.
• Shailesh Ahuja. CTO. He previously worked as a senior software engineer at Meta.

🚀 Traction

• Over 6 million researchers use the platform to draft more than 15 million papers.
• Users include scholars associated with Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, and Google.
• A two-month pilot at Lovely Professional University involving over 60 active faculty members saved more than 375 hours
• More than 300 users at Chulalongkorn University saved over 750 hours during their pilot.
• Arizona State University used the platform for its undergraduate research program.

🏆 Competition

💰 Financials

🚩 Risks