Mindmax, an AI tutor for passing professional exams and learning new skills, has raised £3 million in a pre-seed round. The round was led by Concept Ventures, with participation from Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures and Lerer Hippeau. Angel investors include Maria Raga, former chief executive of Depop, and Torsten Reil, co-founder of Helsing.
Mindmax is an AI platform built to help people resist "cognitive surrender" at a time when many are outsourcing cognitive load to AI. Its first product is an AI tutor for passing professional exams and upskilling. Users learn through real-time conversation with AI tutors, and can interrupt to clarify, ask questions or steer the lesson to where they are stuck. They also see real-time visual explanations and illustrations throughout each session, and each lesson is personalised to the user's existing knowledge, personal goals and approach to learning.
The platform launches as institutions raise concerns about AI's effect on learning. MIT recently warned that AI is creating an "illusion of learning" as "cognitive surrender" rises across education, and an OECD study pointed to a sharp drop in high school reading scores since AI became a core part of students' tool kit. Mindmax comes from the team behind Memrise, the language learning app that reached more than 80 million users globally.
Mindmax was founded by Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar. Cooke became a Grandmaster of Memory at 23 by turning dry information into vivid imagined scenes, and can memorise a deck of cards in under a minute. He taught the same method to Joshua Foer, who went on to win the 2006 US Memory Championship, a story told in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. Cooke then co-founded Memrise, which taught languages to more than 80 million people. Zohar learned to code at the age of seven, began university-level courses at 14 and left school without qualifications at 17. He founded PicBadges, a platform that let people add badges to Facebook profile pictures and reached more than 15 million users, and worked with Cooke for more than a decade as chief technology officer of Memrise.
More than a billion people are going to need to change careers or upskill in the next decade. We created Mindmax to help people boost their brains rather than be replaced - and to make that process a pleasure, not a drama. Building an AI platform to counteract the cognitive malaise being induced by AI might sound like an oxymoron, but we’re fighting fire with fire. The AI-induced slide into cognitive offloading couldn’t be worse-timed - it threatens to put us in a risky professional and intellectual position. We want to re-instill confidence in the human mind and make learning fun, effective and tailored to every beautifully unique person out there.
Curiosity has always been the greatest fuel for learning. Which means you need to be able to ask questions. When you’re in a one-to-one conversation with an expert, you’ll ask 20-30 questions per hour. You can’t do that in a classroom. It’s why our approach is so powerful. Ed and I are prime examples of how every brain learns differently. At school, I was a round peg trying to fit into a square shaped system. It was a disaster and I left without qualifications. Too many people think they aren’t smart, when actually they don't have access to the right style of learning for them. In the AI era, that’s a super vulnerable place for people to be. That’s what Mindmax is going to change. It will completely transform how people retain information, build skills, and future proof their livelihoods.
Ed and Daniel built something remarkable with Memrise, helping tens of millions of people learn languages. At Mindmax, we're seeing these immense talents unleashed in the agentic AI age. The potential of what they can build is now far greater. The early traction they've seen is testament to this - they have an ability to design and deploy products that deliver learning experiences far superior to anything else on the market. We are very excited to be on this scale-up journey with them.
