Irish tech entrepreneurs among backers of Mindstone

Mindstone, a London-based education technology start-up has raised £1.16 million (€ 1.83 million) with a number of well-known Irish tech entrepreneurs rolling in behind it.

The company is the brainchild of Joshua Wohle, who along with serial entrepreneur Dylan Collins previously founded SuperAwesome, which was acquired in a multi-million dollar deal by Fortnite owner Epic last year.

Mr Collins is among the investors to back the company in its seed round. Another backer is Eamonn Carey, managing director at Techstars London, part of the prestigious global accelerator which has accepted more than 1,600 companies with a combined market capitalisation of $18.2 billion into its various programmes since it was established in 2006.

Mindstone is developing a compound learning platform that lets users organise, annotate and highlight webpages, PDFs and academic papers online as they follow information, enabling them to learn faster, remember better and get more done.

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Queen’s College London is among the early users of the platform, using it to facilitate group work during distance learning. Techstars is also using it to build courses on scaling early stage companies.

Mr Carey told The Irish Times that using the platform had quickly become a daily habit for him.

Aggregate

“As someone who takes a lot of notes and shares a lot of articles and content with different people – the idea of being able to aggregate all of that into one platform like Mindstone was compelling. When you layered in the spaced repetition and tech that the team are working on to help you remember and retain more of that knowledge, it became an irresistible proposition,” he said.

The funding round has been led by Moonfire Ventures with The Fund, of which Mr Carey is a partner, Zanichelli Venture and Nex.D participating along with a number of angels.

Mr Wohle said Mindstone uses scientifically proven methods to help users learn quickly and retain more.

"The internet made information universally accessible, Google organised it, and now Mindstone combines it with the science of learning to help people to learn faster, remember more, and develop their skills, interests and career," he said.

Prior to establishing SuperAwesome with Mr Wohle, Mr Collins founded DemonWare, which was acquired by Activision Blizzard, the video games giant behind the Call of Duty franchise. The entrepreneur was also behind Jolt Online Gaming, which was bought by GameStop, the largest video games retailer in the world.