Melon, a London-based microlearning startup that aims to provide upskilling tuition packaged as a social media-style feed that curates relevant content, recently announced that it has raised £1.2 million (USD$1.46 million) in its pre-seed round led by early-stage VC Peak, with participation from Nordic venture fund Inventure. Antler, and additional investors including the CMNTY.XYZ founders community pioneer Siduri Poli, Google app development growth honcho Samarth Sharma and founders business coach Cecilia Bratt, have also participated in the round.
With this fund, the company plans to launch a recruitment drive, while also building on its software platform and outreach activities, aimed at ambitious GenZ employees eager to improve their career chances through peer-to-peer learning.
Founded by Sanne Fouquet, Melon has ported over social media ethos with machine learning used to aggregate learning content curated by the users (which can be posted from any third-party source), enabling learners to take note of what worked for their friends and experts in their field. Once posted on the platform, upskilling content is “resurfaced” by the machine learning technology at regular intervals, helping the user take key learnings on board.
Speaking about the company, Founder & CEO of Melon, Sanne Fouquet, said in a press statement:
We spend hours per day scrolling & micro-learning on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, but once we find something valuable we often forget about it or lose it in a pile of screenshots. Our brain needs to revisit what we learn over time – this strengthens our memory and improves our brain’s ability to recall information. Melon is leveraging machine learning and scientific methods such as active recall to turn insights saved at Melon into long-term knowledge – and to ensure that our users get the most out of their time scrolling social media.
Melon’s team is still carrying out closed beta testing just now, relying on an OTA app testing platform for Apple handset owners called TestFlight. The target market for this test is graphic designers. The startup claims to have a “strong” community of beta users who’ve crafted its development plans.
