Mindsmith, an AI EdTech startup based in Orem, recently announced a $550,000 pre-seed round led by Salt Lake City-based Grix Venture Capital. SaaS Ventures, a Miami-based early-stage investor, also participated in the round.
The round also saw participation from Peterson Ventures (Salt Lake City); Actium Partners (Salt Lake City); Austen Allred, angel investor with Utah roots and current CEO/Co-founder of BloomTech, the San Francisco-based coding bootcamp formerly known as Lambda School; and Stuart Fetzer, angel investor and CEO of wellness and fitness company, Kailo Labs (Salt Lake City), who first learned about Mindsmith at the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute’s Utah Entrepreneur Challenge in February.
Mindsmith, co-founded by Ethan Webb and Zachary Allen, emerged from BYU’s Sandbox startup development programme. It focuses on developing artificial intelligence-powered e-learning tools for instructional designers to streamline the content development process while addressing inefficiencies in the educational technology tools market. The company aims to revolutionize the e-learning authoring tools industry by utilizing artificial intelligence and innovative software engineering techniques. Their approach to improving SCORM (Shared Content Object Reference Model) files, a widely used format for managing web-based electronic educational content developed by the Department of Defence in the early 2000s, is one notable innovation.
According to Webb, SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) files can become unwieldy due to their large size and static nature. However, Mindsmith has found a way to host these files in the cloud within seconds instead of hours while ensuring dynamic updates without requiring users to engage in cumbersome processes like deleting old files or re-uploading new ones.
In addition, the startup’s innovations are designed to save time for Learning Management System (LMS) administrators while providing personalized content contextualized within organizations using AI integration into existing workflows for instructional designers.
MindSmith is currently based at the UVU Business Resource Centre in Orem, which offers low-cost office space subsidized by the state government to startup teams, and it is on its way to transforming e-learning experiences with cutting-edge AI technology applications.
Randall Lloyd is the CEO of Grix Venture Capital. Lloyd previously co-founded Brighter Option, an ad tech software platform that was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. In 2017, he became a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, where he led investments in several Utah-connected SaaS startups (Workstream, Spiff, Grain, Tava Health, Woolly, and others) and many other startups outside the state. Lloyd established Grix in April 2021, raising $20 million for its first fund.
