Mindmax raises £2.5M pre-seed to build an AI tutor grounded in memory science, from the founders of Memrise

Mindmax (London) has raised £2.5 million ($3.3 million) in a pre-seed round led by Concept Ventures, with participation from Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau. Angels include Maria Raga (former CEO of Depop) and Torsten Reil (co-founder of Helsing). The company is building an AI tutoring platform grounded in cognitive science and human memory research. It was founded by Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar, who previously co-founded Memrise, the language learning platform. The round was announced on 5 November 2026.

From Memrise to Mindmax

Ed Cooke is a UK and World Memory Champion and cognitive scientist who built Memrise around the insight that language learning at scale required applying memory science — spaced repetition, retrieval practice, and contextual association — to the product itself rather than simply delivering content. Memrise became one of the most widely-used language learning platforms globally before its acquisition.

Mindmax takes the same intellectual premise and applies it to AI-era tutoring across subjects. The central problem the company is building against is the gap between what an AI can generate and what a learner can retain. A system that provides accurate, articulate explanations on demand does not, by itself, produce durable learning. Cognitive science has identified the techniques that do — retrieval practice, spaced repetition, interleaving of topics, and elaborative questioning — and they all require the learning system to structure when and how a student engages with material, not just what it generates in response to a prompt.

Mindmax's approach is to build those structures into the AI tutor architecture directly. Rather than optimising for the quality of a single explanation, the product is designed around the question of how to build durable knowledge over multiple sessions — which is a different and harder optimisation target than most AI tutoring tools address.

The investment logic at pre-seed

The investor profile is deliberately constructed. Concept Ventures is a London seed fund known for backing consumer-facing products where behavioural product design is the core competitive advantage. Lerer Hippeau provides a US distribution channel and a track record across education and consumer technology. Redrice Ventures and Daybreak Ventures both back early-stage European consumer and B2C companies.

The angels extend the cap table in two directions. Maria Raga's background at Depop — where she scaled a peer-to-peer marketplace to global reach — speaks to consumer product growth mechanics. Torsten Reil's position as Helsing co-founder brings deep-tech and AI credibility from one of Europe's most prominent defence-AI companies: a signal that the technical approach is taken seriously beyond the education category.

The £2.5 million pre-seed funds initial product development and early user acquisition. The 18-month question is whether memory-science-grounded AI tutoring can produce measurably different learning outcomes — and therefore meaningfully different user retention and willingness to pay — compared to the growing field of generic AI tutoring products entering the market from both startups and incumbents.