Middle East Technology Excellence Award 2022 for Startup in Education was presented to Zendy
Dec 6, 2022 |
4 Mins ReadThe platform won the award for startup in the education category, joining the league of past winners such as Du, Amazon (MENA), the Entertainer, & BLOOVO to become one of the most innovative companies in the Middle East.
For tech startup Zendy, it is simply unfair that students, researchers, and professionals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and other developing regions cannot access the same depth of research as those in developed countries. This is despite the rapid shift in the academic publishing spectrum.
Zendy is a product of Knowledge E, a private technology company providing access to digital libraries, training, consulting, and publishing services in the academic sector. Co-founded by entrepreneur Kamran Robert Kardan, it was built in response to the high cost of access to scholarly literature and the limitations of access to academic content in emerging and developing regions.
As such, Zendy, being a fast mover in the industry, offers an alternative to traditional access models. The startup works with publishers and researchers to bridge the gap in equality in emerging regions. It also offers a unique hybrid model for accessing content to meet the consumption needs of academic and non-academic professionals whilst offering publishers a share of the subscriptions’ revenue.
It offers users two options to access content: Zendy Plus and Zendy Open. The former is a subscription-based solution that provides individuals and organisations unlimited access to premium journals from major publishers, whilst the latter is a global open-access solution that features millions of OA resources from leading academic publishers.
Zendy Plus offers unlimited access to research for an average monthly cost of $15, whilst Zendy Open is free and available from anywhere around the world.
Zendy’s monthly user growth rate is 11%, with a sign-up projection of 35,000 by Q4 2022.
Zendy is also an avid supporter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals relating to equality and inclusivity in education to promote lifelong learning opportunities for everyone.
“We’re delighted to be recognised amongst leaders in the technology sector in MENA. What started as a simple concept of creating an affordable and accessible digital library, has now developed into a meaningful platform that empowers individuals to leverage research. The best part is that we’re just getting started. Our recent launch in Nigeria and soon-to-be-released feature updates are all designed to continue our mission to support lifelong learning opportunities for everyone, everywhere,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan.
It has won the Startup - Education category in the recently held Middle East Technology Excellence Awards for this innovation.
The prestigious awards programme honours outstanding companies in the region that have made exceptional contributions in the pursuit of technological innovation in their respective industries.
This article orginally appeared on Asian Business Review.
Zendy signs global agreement with British Online Archives (BOA)
[Dubai, July 15, 2024] - Zendy, a global AI-powered digital research library, has signed an agreement with academic publisher, British Online Archives (BOA). This partnership will bring an influx of primary sources covering the humanities and social sciences to Zendy. British Online Archives is a leading academic publisher that hosts over five million records, carefully sourced from private and public archives, such as The National Archives (UK) and British Library. BOA’s specially curated primary source collections cover over 500 years of world history. They boast extensive documentation from across the globe, providing invaluable source material for students and researchers working within a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Zendy Co-founder, Kamran Kardan said, “We’re happy to partner with British Online Archives to diversify the academic content available on Zendy. The humanities and social sciences are pivotal in understanding the landscape of the current world. We’re delighted to welcome archival content onto our platform. Offering our users a diverse range of enriching scholarly literature is part of our core mission. Through partnerships, we can make a significant impact to ensure that accessibility remains at the forefront of innovation in the academic publishing industry.” Head of Publishing at British Online Archives, Katherine Waite, said, “We are delighted to be forming this partnership with Zendy, whose ethos of providing access to all researchers regardless of their location greatly aligns with our own goal of being an ethically conscious publisher. We look forward to working with them as we open new doors for researchers to access some of our great content.” This partnership with British Online Archives facilitates Zendy’s mission to enhance the discoverability of quality academic content all over the globe. With a significant increase in scholarly literature from the humanities and social sciences, Zendy aims to provide a seamless solution for accessibility with the convenience of having a wide range of research available on one easy-to-use platform. Zendy recently announced a series of new partnerships with IntechOpen, IEEE, IT Governance Publishing, and IGI Global. About Zendy: Zendy is a product of Knowledge E. Since its inception in 2019, Zendy has connected over 500,000 users to academic journals, proceedings, articles, e-books, and more. Zendy is an AI-powered library that aims to make academic literature more affordable and accessible for students, researchers, and professionals worldwide. Zendy recently launched ZAIA - Zendy’s AI assistant for research. ZAIA is a domain-specific Large Language Model designed to help researchers deepen their knowledge base with credible answers backed by references. To learn more, visit www.zendy.io. About British Online Archives: British Online Archives is one of the United Kingdom's leading academic publishers whose goal is to provide students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with access to unique collections of primary source documents. To learn more, visit www.microform.digital/boa/.
Zendy Announces New Version Releases of ZAIA - AI Assistant
United Arab Emirates, 13th March 2024 - AI-powered research library Zendy has announced the launch of a significant version release for its domain-specific Large Language Model (LMM), ZAIA (Zendy AI Assistant). Developed by Zendy’s data science team and initially launched in December 2023, ZAIA is designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of research discovery and literature review. In this new version, a host of new features have been introduced to support researchers: Ask ZAIA: You can now ask specific questions to ZAIA on a paper level, giving you a new way to conduct in-depth analysis during literature review. PDF Analysis: ZAIA can now analyse any PDF. Upload or link a research paper with sections, and ZAIA will extract, analyse, and summarise each section, including the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and references. Reference validation and verification: using techniques such as chain of verification, all references go through a validation and verification process to increase accuracy. Conversation and analysis history: once you log in, you can now see a complete history of all conversations with ZAIA and a history of PDFs analysed. An enhanced fine-tuned model for increased accuracy. ZAIA is also now accessible without registration. ZAIA is not a general-purpose language model. It is fine-tuned with Zendy’s own data sources, allowing it to support higher-level abstractions for research-specific use cases. “ZAIA 0.1 takes us closer to our vision of creating an ecosystem of research-centric AI tools using the latest development methods that increase efficiency and reliability. The future of research is intertwined with the vast capabilities of AI, and we are committed to leveraging the best of AI to provide solutions to the pressing issues researchers face in research discovery,” said Zendy’s Chief Technology Officer, Rodrigo Pinto. “We have a core focus on increasing collaboration with publishers and data providers to navigate the increasing potential of AI. We look forward to extending the vast capabilities of our LLM and all our learnings to institutions, publishers, and organisations looking to streamline information discovery and retrieval using AI,” said Zendy Co-founder Kamran Kardan. Committed to helping foster an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships rooted in responsible AI practices, Zendy believes AI is important in fostering an equitable research and publishing ecosystem, but only with ethical guidelines. In response to the growing discussion around AI, Zendy recently released a list of AI imperatives to guide strategic development and the integration of AI technologies. To find out more about Zendy’s AI solutions, email hello@zendy.io. You can use ZAIA now on Zendy, visit www.zendy.io/zaia. To read the Zendy AI Imperatives statement, click here. About Zendy Zendy is a product of Knowledge E. Since its inception in 2019, Zendy has introduced over 500,000 users to a better way to research. Zendy’s intuitive AI-powered research library features millions of journals, articles, e-books, and more, allowing users to access unlimited content for an affordable monthly subscription. Zendy also offers a free open-access plan. Press contact: Monica Chinsami Head of Marketing
Zendy and IntechOpen's Joint Webinar: Addressing Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.
We hosted a joint webinar with IntechOpen in November that addressed emerging technologies across different industries that contribute to sustainability and research accessibility and discovery. The webinar was titled, “Emerging Technologies - Partnering for Accessibility, Discoverability and a Sustainable Future.” The session featured 3 key speakers, Dr. Jo Havemann representing AfricArXiv, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from Technical University of Berlin and Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami. Each speaker articulated how their organisation works to increase sustainable practices through research dissemination. Zendy’s Head of Marketing, Monica Chinsami highlighted our library’s initiatives to advance the accessibility and discoverability of scholarly literature. In an effort to break geographical barriers in research, Zendy partners with leading publishers to ensure their content reaches regions with limited access via our global subscription. Additionally, Professor Tatiana Morosuk from the Technical University of Berlin placed emphasis on the transionary period the energy sector is experiencing as it moves away from fossil fuel and towards technology focused on sustainability. The professor stated the importance of innovation to advance sustainable practices and energy use. Finally, Dr. Jo Havemann stated how AfricArXiv is on a mission to make African research more discoverable as this is in line with SDG 4 (Quality Education), the organisation announced their collaboration with Ubuntunet which is a network provider that assists with connectivity and infrastructure for research and education institutions. Advancing research dissemination catalyses SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). As equitable research platforms emerge and partner to expand their reach, the more academic research is democratised to create knowledgable societies. We look forward to hosting more webinars in 2024, to tackle and highlight the initiatives in the world of academia. Discover millions of e-books, journal articles, proceedings and more on Zendy now.