AI-powered human intelligence

Kinnu, a London-based startup that has built an AI-powered ‘learning engine’ has raised $6.5m from LocalGlobe and Cavalry Ventures, with participation from Spark Capital and Jigsaw and an all-star angel cast including Tom Hulme from Google Ventures, Guy Podjarny, and Rene Rechtman. This brings their total funding to $9m.

Content used to be king amongst learning and edtech startups. Kinnu made an early bet in 2021 that AI would rebalance the concentration of asset value away from content and shift instead towards the technology to actually acquire and retain knowledge.

“We always thought it was strange that most online education offerings took the worst of school and just scaled it,” says Co-founder & CEO Christopher Kahler. “We think there’s a huge opportunity for AI-powered learning that focuses on accelerating the pace of human learning itself. 10 years ago, online learning experienced a boom because they democratised access to content. The next frontier is democratising access to mechanism so anything becomes learnable, from the sciences to soft skills. That really excites us.”

Most learning experiences today, from online courses for university to corporate education, are designed around the needs of the educational content creator, not the learner. The Kinnu founders predicted that AI could solve that problem by optimising content for the learner, combined with a ‘learning engine’ that could power the learning through adaptive experience design. “Ultimately, our mission is to give everyone the power to learn anything they want to,” says Christopher. “We want mastery to be a choice.”

Experienced founders with a passion for learning

Before founding Kinnu, co-founders Christopher and Abraham built and exited Qriously, a real-time market research startup backed by Accel and Spark. During their post-acquisition ‘sabbatical,’ they met Hanna who would soon join as Kinnu’s third founder. It was the perfect startup founding story: they literally worked out of a garage, geeking out about the science of learning. “Our backgrounds are perfectly complementary,” says Hanna. “I worked at Google, Futurelearn and Deliveroo and studied at Harvard, so we all bring a unique perspective on what the future of learning could look like and how to build it.”

Martin Janicki, partner at Cavalry Ventures, said: “What excites us about Kinnu is their sui generis approach to solving the problem of learning from both the creator and learner side, as well as the surface area of applicability. Learning is what makes us human, and we do it at all stages of life.”

“We’re on the brink of an enormous transformation in how people learn knowledge and skills,” said Suzanne Ashman, General Partner at LocalGlobe. “From our first meeting with Kinnu’s co-founders, it was clear that their approach to both knowledge acquisition and assessment could deliver huge leaps forward in learning productivity, and give learners more space to focus on application of knowledge. We're particularly excited about the founders' approach of AI-driven interdisciplinary learning, allowing people to make connections between different areas in a way that hasn't been possible in traditional education institutions.”

Kinnu is currently focusing on adult enthusiast learners. “Da Vinci's we call them - people don’t realise this, but they constitute over one quarter of the market for online learning today,” says Hanna. “This market gives us more product design latitude to build quickly, free from the constraints we’d have with academic institutions, for example.”

Kinnu is about to crack 100,000 downloads and over 4 million ‘smart reviews’ have already been answered on the app.