Mindmax, a London learning startup founded by Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar of language app Memrise, raised £2.5m (about $3.4m) in a seed round announced on 5 November 2026.
Concept Ventures led the round. Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures and Lerer Hippeau also invested, along with angels including Maria Raga, the former chief executive of Depop, and Torsten Reil, a co-founder of defence company Helsing. The valuation was not disclosed.
The company said it will keep developing the product and its AI models so lessons can be tailored more closely to each learner.
“More than a billion people are going to need to change careers or upskill in the next decade,”Ed Cooke, co-founder, Mindmax
What Mindmax does
Mindmax's first product is an AI tutor for people studying for professional exams or learning new skills for work. Learners talk to it by voice in real time and can cut in with questions or push the lesson towards the parts they find hard, while the app draws diagrams and illustrations on screen.
Each lesson is adjusted to what the user already knows, their goals and how they like to learn. The company says this back-and-forth format beats classroom teaching and one-way video, though Tech.eu noted that no data was published to support the claim.
Mindmax pitches itself against what it calls "cognitive surrender", the worry that people who lean on AI chatbots stop thinking for themselves. Its announcement pointed to research from MIT and the OECD on the effects of AI use on learning. Cooke said that building an AI product to push back against that trend was like fighting fire with fire.
The founders
Cooke is a memory competitor who became a Grand Master of Memory at 23 and coached Joshua Foer, the 2006 US memory champion whose story became the book Moonwalking with Einstein. Zohar taught himself to code as a child, left school at 17 and spent more than a decade as Memrise's CTO. He earlier built PicBadges, which the company said reached more than 15 million users.
Memrise, which the two co-founded, has more than 80 million users, according to the announcement.
"More than a billion people are going to need to change careers or upskill in the next decade," Cooke said, adding that Mindmax wants to help people strengthen their thinking instead of being replaced. Zohar said learners in a one-to-one conversation with an expert ask 20 to 30 questions an hour, far more than in a classroom, and that this is what the product tries to reproduce.
Who invested
Oliver Kicks, a partner at Concept Ventures, pointed to the founders' record with Memrise and said Mindmax had early traction, without giving figures. The company has not disclosed user numbers, revenue, headcount or total funding.
The announcement was not consistent on the stage: its headline calls the round a seed, while one passage describes it as pre-seed. Tech.eu reported it as venture funding of £2.5m.
Company website: mindmax.it