companies

Cactus Communications

Scholarly communications company behind Paperpal, an AI writing and manuscript-readiness assistant used by millions of researchers.

Cactus Communications was founded in Mumbai in 2002 by brothers Abhishek and Anurag Goel, after a chance encounter with a Japanese professor who needed help getting a paper past a journal's English-language bar. That single editing job grew into Editage, an author-services brand now serving researchers publishing in international journals, and the company later took the name CACTUS to reflect a broader shift from manual editing into publishing technology. Today CACTUS operates from offices in multiple countries with a workforce that spans thousands of full-time staff, freelance editors, and contractors, serving researchers across more than 190 countries. Abhishek Goel stepped back from the CEO role in 2025, handing day-to-day leadership to Akhilesh Ayer while remaining involved as a board member. Paperpal, the company's AI product line, extends that decades-long author-services business into automated grammar checking, citation formatting, and journal-submission readiness checks, aiming to compress work that used to require a human editing turnaround into an in-the-moment writing assistant.

Founded

2002

Headquarters

Mumbai, India

Sector

applications