Memrise founders raise $3.3M for Mindmax, an AI tutor for exams

Mindmax, a London start-up founded by the team behind the language app Memrise, has raised $3.3m (£2.5m) in pre-seed funding to build an AI tutor. The company announced the round today, and its first product is designed to help people pass professional exams and learn new skills for work.

Concept Ventures led the investment, the London fund backed voice AI company ElevenLabs early on, and this time it was joined by Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

Well-known founders also invested as angels; among them are Maria Raga, the former chief executive of Depop, and Torsten Reil, who co-founded the defence AI company Helsing.

Rather than watching videos or reading notes, Mindmax users learn by talking to an AI tutor in real time. As the lesson goes on, they can interrupt to ask a question or steer it towards the part they find hard, while the app draws diagrams and illustrations on screen.

Each lesson also adapts to the person taking it, the company said. The tutor considers what the user already knows and what they want to achieve.

For co-founder Ed Cooke, the timing matters because many workers will soon need to retrain.

“More than a billion people are going to need to change careers or upskill in the next decade,” Cooke said.

Cooke has worked on learning tools for more than a decade. He co-founded Memrise, which the company says has reached more than 80 million users, after becoming a Grand Master of Memory at the age of 23. He also coached the writer Joshua Foer, who went on to win the 2006 US Memory Championship.

His co-founder, Daniel Zohar, took a very different path. Zohar left school at 17, founded PicBadges, a tool for adding badges to Facebook profile pictures, and later joined Cooke as chief technology officer of Memrise.

Together, the two pitch Mindmax as a way to keep people thinking for themselves at a time when more of them are handing mental work to AI. That concern has also reached universities.

In August, a committee at MIT warned that students who turn to AI too quickly can be left with “the illusion of learning”.

Mindmax’s answer is conversation, and according to Zohar, people in a one-to-one session with an expert ask 20 to 30 questions an hour, far more than in a classroom. The tutor is meant to give every learner that chance.