- Mindmax has raised $3.3 million in a pre-seed round led by Concept Ventures.
- Founders Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar previously worked together at Memrise.
- The eight-person team says their AI tutor focuses on assisting with AI-driven ‘cognitive surrender’.
Ed Cooke became a Grand Master of Memory at 23. He’s now working on an AI tutor that will help people take control of their own thinking rather than relying on AI.
Mindmax has raised $3.3 million in a pre-seed round led by Concept Ventures, which was also the first VC to back ElevenLabs. Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau also joined.
Angel investors in the round include Maria Raga, former CEO of Depoplo, and Torsten Reil, co-founder of Helsing, the defence AI company which raised $1.8 billion at an $18 billion valuation in July 2026.
The company is very much in its infancy. Cooke told Tech Fund News that the app is live globally on both the App Store and the Play Store, with the US launch coming first. The eight-person team has six full-time members based in Paris, Latvia, London and India.
A memory champion and a school dropout
Cooke earned his memory title by learning to turn the most mundane of facts into vivid mental images. He once memorised a 1000-digit number in an hour and can memorise a whole deck of cards in under a minute.
Cooke taught this technique to journalist Joshua Foer, who went on to win the 2006 US Memory Championship, as detailed in “Moonwalking with Einstein.” Memrise claims to have helped over 80 million people learn a language.
His co-founder, Daniel Zohar, started coding at 7 and was taking university-level courses by 14. Zohar left school at 17 with no qualifications and then founded PicBadges, which allowed you to add badges to your Facebook profile picture and had over 15 million users, and worked with Cooke for over 10 years as Memrise’s CTO.
“Ed and I are prime examples of how every brain learns differently. At school, I was a round peg trying to fit into a square shaped system. It was a disaster and I left without qualifications. Too many people think they aren’t smart, when actually they don’t have access to the right style of learning for them. In the AI era, that’s a super vulnerable place for people to be. That’s what Mindmax is going to change. It will completely transform how people retain information, build skills, and future proof their livelihoods,” said Zohar.
Fighting fire with fire
Mindmax’s first product is an AI tutor for professional exam preparation and upskilling. You can interact with it in real time, interrupt it, ask questions, or steer the lesson toward what you need help with. It provides visual explanations and illustrations throughout.
Cooke says it will draw diagrams, test you and give you reminders. The lesson will adapt to your knowledge level, objectives, and preferred learning style.
“More than a billion people are going to need to change careers or upskill in the next decade. We created Mindmax to help people boost their brains rather than be replaced — and to make that process a pleasure,” said Cooke.
Accuracy is absolutely critical in an exam prep product, and Cooke was very upfront about that. Mindmax is a specialist product, with experts reviewing the course content and technical checks in place. The company hasn’t published any error rates yet.
Mindmax says its interactive lessons are better than classroom teaching and one-way video, and that the product will keep improving as the model improves. Cooke says that using the Memrise approach with large language models lets them reach retention levels we could only have dreamed of previously.
Cooke admits it’s a bit of an oxymoron: “Building an AI platform to counteract the cognitive malaise being induced by AI might sound like an oxymoron, but we’re fighting fire with fire. The AI-induced slide into cognitive offloading couldn’t be worse-timed — it threatens to put us in a risky professional and intellectual position. We want to re-instill confidence in the human mind and make learning fun, effective and tailored to every beautifully unique person out there.”
Familiar backers in a crowded field
Cooke doesn’t view the other AI tutors as Mindmax’s main rivals. He thinks the market is underdeveloped and that the real competition comes from in-person training and schools, since there simply aren’t that many tutors.
Elsewhere, Medly AI in London raised an $8 million seed round led by Felix Capital for AI exam prep and now has over 400k users. Speak raised $78 million at a $1B valuation in December 2024 for conversation-based language learning. Futura in Italy secured €14 million in Series A for its AI virtual tutor. Preply raised $70 million in equity and debt and launched an AI assistant for tutors. Lucida AI in London landed $7 million to compete with Duolingo.
“Ed and Daniel built something remarkable with Memrise, helping tens of millions of people learn languages. The potential of what they can build is now far greater. The early traction they’ve seen is testament to this — they have an ability to design and deploy products that deliver learning experiences far superior to anything else on the market,” said Oliver Kicks, a partner at Concept Ventures.
The market is growing, with MarketsandMarkets expecting AI in education to grow from $2.21 billion in 2024 to $5.82 billion by 2030, a 17.5% compound annual growth rate.
According to Cooke, the new funding will go to growth and technology development. If Mindmax can do that, it might go some way toward answering whether cognitive offloading technology can, in fact, reverse its effects.
