Meet the founder
Hedderik van Rijn, professor of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience at the University of Groningen, arrived in Groningen by way of Amsterdam, Nijmegen and Pittsburgh. What travelled with him at every step was an interest in how human memory works, and a growing conviction that a model of memory is worth more once it leaves the laboratory.
His research builds computational cognitive models: computer programs that emulate how the brain processes and retains information. If you understand how forgetting works, you can predict which facts a learner is about to lose, and reintroduce them at exactly the right moment. Not too early, which wastes time, and not too late, which means relearning from scratch. Where conventional learning systems look only at whether an answer was correct, his model also reads response time. Hesitation before a correct answer is itself a signal that reinforcement is needed. In practice the approach improves learning outcomes by 10 to 20 per cent.
The idea took shape around 2007 while supervising a student’s thesis. A publisher’s interest in building the system into its online learning tools turned an academic model into something with a market, and eventually into a company. At the same time, he developed a fundamental research line which in 2017 resulted in a VICI grant of 1.5 million euros, one of the most prestigious personal research grants in the Netherlands.
The challenge
Van Rijn describes something he sees regularly among colleagues: researchers who reach a point mid-career where the next fundamental question no longer pulls the way it once did. The knowledge is there, the ambition is there, but the direction is not obvious. Application can be that new direction, and it is precisely at this point that it is easy to get stuck. A scientist who wants to build a company is being asked to do something no part of an academic career has prepared them for.
That is where the first step matters most, and where it is most often not taken.
Where RUG Ventures came in
The first conversations with RUG Ventures took place in 2016; the investment followed in 2020. For Van Rijn, that is the value of RUG Ventures in a sentence: it gives a scientist a realistic way to take the first step towards a company, and it is willing to be there long before the picture is complete.
RUG Ventures is, in his experience, a good partner for knowledge-intensive companies in particular, and prepared to invest at a very early stage when few others are. Just as important is what does not drive the relationship: RUG Ventures is not purely money-driven, and that is what makes having them on board useful in a way capital alone would not be.
The clearest evidence of that is what happened next. When Van Rijn started a second company, he went to RUG Ventures again. That, he says, says enough about how the collaboration works.
Where things stand
MemoryLab is in a strong growth phase. More than two million pupils now have access to the platform and use it, and the growth is coming from both the Netherlands and abroad. What began as one professor and a part-time developer is now a multidisciplinary team of around ten FTE: scientists, programmers and commercial specialists. There are partnerships with public schools in Groningen, Montessori schools all over the country and organisations such as ETS in the United States, and the technology has been extended into Precision Cognition Labs, which maps memory processes to help detect cognitive impairment in dementia, concussion and other conditions.
Behind the growth sits a mission that goes further than the product. Van Rijn wants to see less testing of facts in education, because testing facts is a poorer way of making knowledge stick than practising without tests. Pupils who practise this way retain more, are less stressed, are happier and score higher. The tool is the means; changing how schools deal with factual knowledge is the point.
And the part he enjoys most has not changed since Pittsburgh: combining research with application, and watching each one sharpen the other.
Advice to other researchers
Van Rijn’s advice to scientists considering the same route comes in two parts. Be aware of how much you do not know. And find someone for your organisation who does know the mores of doing business, because that knowledge is not something a research career hands you.
Find out more about MemoryLab on their website.
Find out more about Hedderik van Rijn on their LinkedIn.