Purpose-driven edtech startup Mindstone has just raised €1.7 million in an exciting crowdfunding campaign that sees them close funding well over target and become one of the largest edtech funding campaigns to date on the Seedrs platform.
London-founded in 2020, Mindstone is the latest venture from CEO Joshua Wohle following the acquisition of his previous startup, SuperAwesome, in 2020. Joshua is now on a mission to transform approaches to online education, a sector that we’ve seen a lot of activity in recently.
With the belief that the internet is the most powerful learning resource in the modern world, Mindstone is rethinking online education from the ground up. The young company has a vision to democratise education in a way that enables people to learn faster and remember more. The platform aspires to empower people to personalise their learning, consuming the content that is of most interest and relevancy to them.
By employing the science of learning, the Mindstone platforms allow experts from all walks of life to create engaging courses, built using the best pre-existing online articles, podcasts, and video – harnessing the power of digital education assets. As a result, anyone can be a teacher and everyone can access a vast range of courses, from astrophysics to zoology and everything in between.
Founder and CEO Joshua Wohle 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. Meanwhile, our compound learning approach – course content evolves based on questions and feedback from learners to continuously enhance the experience – puts learners themselves at the heart of everything, as they should be.”
Mindstone already has several well-known organisations and individuals using the platform to create courses, including The Bitcoin Association (Bitcoin Basics), Landscape VC (How To Raise Funding For Your Startup), Flown (How To Do Deep Work) Radix (An Overview of Radix DLT), The Body Collective (Women’s Health: How To Live Your Best Life After 40).
Influencers have also signed up to contribute courses and share their expertise, including Jack Edwards, a lifestyle, travel, and literature blogger (How To Be A Better Reader), “studytuber” Unjaded Jade (How to Self Study), Vix Meldrew (How to Build Your Personal Brand on Instagram), and Eleanor Neale (How to Research a True Crime Case).
The innovative social impact startup also has a commercial partnership with the Harvard Business Review. Combining the best of both these platforms will allow users to learn faster and remember more, harnessing the power of online education.
This fresh funding campaign includes commitments from Moonfire Ventures founder Mattias Ljungman – who is backing the company to join Klarna, Viagogo, Peakon, and ClimateCorp as unicorns he funded at the earliest stages. The campaign also received investment from 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.
While Mindstone is already available on desktop, iOS, and Android, the funding just raised will support an increased focus on developing its mobile platforms, as well as further research and development, hiring and commercial partnerships – further advancing the democratisation of online education.
