Mindstone, an online compound learning platform that allows people to annotate the web, has secured $2.2 million (approx £1.6 million) funding in a seed round led by Moonfire Ventures.
Others including The Fund, Zanichelli Venture, Nex.D, and a series of angels including, former co-founders at SuperAwesome also participated in the round. The funding will allow the company to further build a learning platform that develops and accelerates growth.
Focuses on compound learning
Based out of London, Mindstone helps people learn faster and remember more from any content available on the internet. The company focuses on compound learning, a concept rooted in increasing the connections between new and existing knowledge to help you learn faster and remember more.
Notably, the platform lets you organise, share and take notes on web pages, PDFs, and academic papers easily, accelerating the learning process.
Established during lockdown
Founded by Joshua Wöhle, a Dutch living in London and has been actively investing in edtech for a few years and previously co-founded SuperAwesome along with his co-founders Patrick Cootes, Florian Zysset, Dr. Melody Lang, and Stefan Keranov in the first week of UK lockdown, Mindstone aims to provide a learning platform for anyone, anywhere in the world.
“We are moving to a world of continuous learning but the tools to help us do this are insufficient. Mindstone is reinventing the learning process rather than simply shifting the offline classroom experience online. They aim to use online first solutions that also receive the benefit of the power of crowds.” said Mattias Ljungman of Moonfire Ventures.
Joshua Wohle said: “We are determined to close the gap that 200 years of education systems have yet to fill: how we learn. At Mindstone, we don’t represent an establishment or an institution. We only represent the learner. Our mission is to empower you to develop yourself and meet your goals by being in charge of your own learning journey.”
Learning platform for anyone, anywhere
As of now, the app is completely free to use, although it is currently restricted to desktop-only. The company is working on the mobile version and will be rolled out in the future.
Mindstone is used by students and professionals wanting to accelerate their own learning, as well as institutions as diverse as Techstars to build courses on scaling early-stage companies and Queen’s College London to facilitate group work during distance learning.
“We tested Mindstone with the Techstars London batch this year – sharing relevant articles and content week by week during the program. It was incredibly helpful to be able to annotate things and have reminders and notifications sent to the founders to keep them updated with articles that were useful for them at that specific moment of the program,” said Eamonn Carey, Managing Director at Techstars.