Zanichelli Venture & Nex.D
Via Ugo Bassi, 7, Bologna, 40121, Italy
Overview
Zanichelli Venture is looking for nascent companies who are tilling daring ideas about education and technology and searching for pre-seed or seed funding to grow these ideas into products to empower anyone – from children and parents to adult, professional lifelong learners and their mentors and coaches – to learn and teach better. We will support and finance ideas with the potential to have a positive impact on our future through education at every stage of our life. We will respectfully, discreetly stand by the entrepreneurs believing in these ideas, from the beginnings and at least since that impact leaves its first dent. We care about each startup in our portfolio getting the full value a hundred years old education company like Zanichelli can offer, wherever our expertise can be a lodestar because of our history, our mission, our network, our resources; and we believe in getting out of the founders’ way otherwise, if we don’t add value. We care about financial returns and self-sustainability and about bringing collaboration opportunities, insights, innovative thinking and entrepreneurial energy back to our company digital products designers, editorial staff and IT, searching for mutual advantages. Only in the long term, as we and the founders build trust through intense collaboration and shared stakes, and after a startup fully spreads out its potential as a maturing company, we believe in searching together for possible paths to a deeper partnership. We co-invest globally, following trusted, local lead investors.
- Total investments
- 1
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 0
- Active investors
- 1
Sector focus
- Children
- Corporate Training
- EdTech
- Education
- Higher Education
Investment portfolio
- Mindstone
Participated · Seed · Feb 2021
Mindstone is a London-based edtech platform that enables experts to create engaging courses compiled from existing online articles, podcasts, and videos. The product is designed to help learners remember and learn across a wide range of topics, from astrophysics to zoology. Several organisations and influencers already use the platform to create courses, including The Bitcoin Association, Landscape VC, Flown, Radix, The Body Collective, Jack Edwards, Unjaded Jade, Vix Meldrew, and Eleanor Neale. Founded in 2020 by CEO Joshua Wohle, the company plans to use newly raised funds to increase focus on mobile, advance research and development, hire staff, and grow commercial partnerships. Mindstone's model centers on assembling disparate media into structured, teachable formats and partnering with subject-matter experts and creators to expand course offerings. The recent crowdfunding raise provides capital to accelerate product development and go-to-market efforts. Mindstone offers a compound learning platform that helps users organize, share and take notes on web pages, PDFs and academic papers to accelerate learning and retention. The product aggregates highlights and generates flashcards automatically, leveraging spaced repetition and rapid feedback loops. It targets students and professionals seeking faster learning, and is also used by institutions such as Techstars and Queen’s College London for course-building and group work. The company is led by Joshua Wöhle with co-founders Patrick Cootes, Florian Zysset, Melody Lang and Stefan Keranov. Mindstone raised $2.2M in seed funding and intends to use the proceeds to continue developing the platform.
Team
Enrico Poli
Director
LinkedIn