Mindstone, a UK-based EdTech platform that offers bespoke courses on topics ranging from Bitcoin basics to women’s health, has raised £1.45 million through a crowdfunding campaign.
Investors who participated in the funding round include Moonfire Ventures founder Mattias Ljungman, who has previously backed companies that went on to become unicorns, including Klarna and Viagogo. Others include impact investment fund Mustard Seed Maze, Techstars managing director Eamonn Carey, US VC Scout Fund, Zanichelli Venture, and Andrew Gault, founding partner of 7percent Ventures.
The company plans to use the funds to increase mobile services, R&D, hire talents and build commercial partnerships.
Founded in March 2020 by Joshua Wohle, Mindstone curates online content including articles, podcasts, and video. It enables learners to build a course based on their goals and preferences. The platform is currently serving students and professionals wanting to accelerate their own learning, as well as institutions from Techstars (building courses on scaling early-stage startups) to Queen’s college London (facilitating group work while socially distanced).
Mindstone’s vision is to build a platform that automatically creates the best learning pathways from content available online. The company uses scientifically proven techniques to improve the way an individual learns and remembers what they read, so they can focus on applying their insights more efficiently.
Talking about the platform, Joshua Wohle, Founder & CEO of Mindstone, said,
“Online education is broken. Providers and courses too often simply replicate traditional in-person teaching methods in an online environment and are typically bound to static, one-size-fits-all curricula. We are rethinking online education from the ground up to solve this problem. The internet is the greatest knowledge bank in human history, and our platform makes it as easy for anyone to build a course from existing high-quality online material as it is to curate a playlist on Spotify.”
Mindstone has several well-known organisations and individuals using the platform to create courses, including The Bitcoin Association, Landscape VC, Flown, Radix, The Body Collective, and Seed Legals, among others.
Mattias Ljungman, Founder and Managing partner of Moonfire, said,
“I am always on the hunt for the next category-creating disruptor, and when Joshua first described Mindstone to me, I knew I had to invest.”
Mindstone said the latest funding round is the largest ever EdTech crowdfund on Seedrs, an online seed and angel investment crowdfunding platform. The startup has recently signed a commercial partnership with one of the world’s most widely-respected publishers, Harvard Business Review.
Earlier this year, Mindstone had raised $2.2 million in a seed round led by Moonfire Ventures, with participation from The Fund, Zanichelli Venture, and Nex.D.
