Final Call for ZNotes

A social impact platform making revision notes accessible to millions of students worldwide. Closing this week!

We are moving to close this deal by Thursday 1 June. You can subscribe to the deal via the form below. Original message follows.

Dear All

We’re pleased to open up our next deal: ZNotes. It’s a startup we've been personally connected to via UCL Enterprise for several years and we’re excited they’re in a position to open their fundraise to our syndicate.

ZNotes is levelling the educational playing field with a student-empowered and technology-enabled approach to content creation and peer learning. To date, they've reached 4+ million students (1.6M in 2022) and 31+ million hits, growing organically through their engaged student community. Zubair the founder started it aged only 16. He was recognised with the Diana Legacy Award for his efforts and presented ZNotes to HRH Prince William at Kensington Palace. They are raising their first round kickstarted with senior leaders in education and impact (ex-MD Pearson, Global Advisor at Ashoka, Misk, INTO).

The minimum deal commitment is £1k.

What we like:

We have a lot of confidence in Zubair, the founder. We met him through a UCL student enterprise mentorship programme, so we’ve watched his progress over years as he’s bootstrapped the business to its current state. In particular, he’s built a passionate community of volunteers around him supporting the platform’s growth. Now he’s ready to take things to the next level.

He’s always been passionate about the model of “business for good” and ZNotes is designed with a vision of social impact at its heart. ZNotes takes a quality-over-quantity approach to content. The product helps students worldwide access quality revision materials.

Bull case
ZNotes succeeds in its mission to sell its product to schools and later governments as part of national curricula. It achieves this via driving adoption through students. Big contracts drive revenue and mass adoption. Zubair hasn’t spelled out an exit vision, but we see this growing into a big enterprise, or even in a medium-success case attracting the interest of big education brands like Khan Academy.

Bear case
ZNotes has succeeded so far on the strength of the passion of its founder and volunteers - it has a dedicated community, but it may struggle to achieve mass adoption with its monetisation models. We have no doubt Zubair will keep the brand alive, but it may not achieve a big exit. Even in this case, the reach will no doubt keep growing enabling to develop alternate revenue streams based on its user base and grow the business more steadily.

Learn more in their overview deck here.*

Register your interest for this deal through this form, minimum commitment is the standard £1k.

Deal Summary

S/EIS eligible: Yes, SEIS
Round Size: £750k
Equity / Pre-Money Valuation: £3.75M
Min. syndicate commitment: £10k
Max. syndicate allocation: No max

Deadline: 1 June

* Zubair has also prepared a very thorough data room in Notion - it’s the best we’ve ever seen. He’s happy to share it with any investors who are putting in significant cheques.