Co-Founder & CEO · RemNote
Martin
Schneider
He aced his MIT classes, then watched the knowledge evaporate a semester later. So he wrote software to make it stay.
// the builder who refused to forget
He aced his MIT classes, then watched the knowledge evaporate a semester later. So he wrote software to make it stay.
Martin Schneider runs RemNote, and the easiest way to understand the company is to picture the moment that started it. A computer science student walks out of an MIT exam having genuinely mastered the material. Four months later, almost none of it remains. The semester worked like a deadline that also functioned as a delete button.
Most students shrug and accept that. Schneider treated it as a bug. He started writing code in 2017 to patch his own memory, and the patch eventually became RemNote: an all-in-one workspace where your notes and your flashcards live in the same place, so the thing you write down is the same thing that quizzes you weeks later.
The pitch is almost suspiciously simple. Type a couple of characters and a regular note turns into a spaced-repetition card. No exporting. No second app. No friction between learning and remembering.
Today that idea serves more than a million people, many of them medical and STEM students whose entire careers depend on retaining enormous volumes of detail. RemNote did not invent spaced repetition. What Schneider built was the thing that makes a hundred-year-old learning science feel automatic.
It helps to know what Schneider is not. He is not a marketer who found a category, and he is not a researcher who published a paper and walked away. He is a builder who got annoyed at a problem he had every single day and kept sanding it down until it disappeared. That distinction shows up everywhere in RemNote, a product that feels designed by someone who has to live inside it rather than someone who only has to sell it.
The version of this story that gets told at pitch competitions is tidy: student spots problem, builds product, raises money. The real one is slower and more stubborn. For three years RemNote was nobody's startup. It was one person's tool.
Schneider used it himself, daily, while he tried everything else first. He drilled cards in Anki. He chased mnemonic techniques through the world of the USA Memory Championship. He bolted together a poor-man's Zettelkasten inside Evernote. Each tool did one thing well and forced him to glue the rest together by hand.
That long stretch of using his own unfinished software shaped a conviction he still repeats: the people designing a tool should personally and deeply live inside the problem it solves. RemNote was not researched into existence. It was worn in.
Only in 2020 did he decide to let other people in, teaming up with co-founder Moritz Wallawitsch and a small founding crew. The private habit became a public company.
The path there ran straight through MIT. Schneider grew up near Philadelphia, came up through Upper Dublin High School, and then went deep at the Institute - undergrad, a master's, and the start of a PhD, all in computer science, all in Cambridge. It is the kind of resume that usually ends in a research lab or a quant desk. His ended in a note-taking app, which tells you something about where his actual curiosity pointed.
I went ice skating for the first time in two years, and it went much better than expected. I found myself recalling spaced repetition cards while on the ice to fix issues with my posture.— Martin Schneider, on X
Plenty of apps help you store information. RemNote's bet is that storing is the easy part and remembering is the point. Here is the loop that hooked a million people.
>> and the note quietly becomes a flashcard.RemNote stitched together the tools Schneider used to juggle by hand. The bars below sketch how much of the learner's workflow now lives under one roof - notes, cards, PDFs, scheduling, and the syntax that ties them together.
In September 2021, Schneider did two things at once. He shipped a full redesign of RemNote, and he announced that the company had raised a $2.8M seed round. He framed it on X with characteristic understatement, calling it the start of RemNote's next chapter and crediting a team that had, in his words, poured a ton of love into the work over the preceding months.
The cap table read like a vote of confidence from people who fund category-defining software: General Catalyst, the Berlin-based 468 Capital, Soma Capital, and Dorm Room Fund, the student-run firm that backs founders still close to the campuses RemNote serves. The money had a clear job - grow the team and ship new products toward the all-in-one learning workspace Schneider keeps describing.
What's notable is the order of operations. Most founders raise to find product-market fit. Schneider had spent years finding it the slow way, on himself, before a single investor wrote a check. The round funded acceleration, not discovery.
The clearest signal of what RemNote is for comes from who reaches for it under pressure. Medical students preparing for board exams, pre-meds grinding toward the MCAT, and STEM students facing oceans of material have made it part of their daily routine. These are people for whom forgetting is not an inconvenience but a professional risk, and they gravitate to a tool that treats memory as something you can engineer rather than something you hope for.
That audience also explains the product's restraint. RemNote could have chased every productivity trend. Instead it kept circling the same loop - capture, link, review - because that loop is what high-stakes learners need most. Schneider has talked about wanting RemNote to be the place where you store knowledge in an external brain that actually feeds it back into your real one, on a schedule tuned to the moment just before you'd lose it.
Schneider describes himself, plainly, as curious about tools for thought, learning, and software engineering. The ambition underneath RemNote is bigger than a better notebook. He talks about wanting learning to feel less like cramming and more like downloading a skill - something you acquire once and then carry, instead of re-acquiring every semester.
There's a phrase he keeps returning to: moving people from knowledge-management to knowledge-creation. Organizing what you know is table stakes. The interesting work starts when remembering becomes so reliable that you can build new ideas on top of old ones without the floor dropping out.
It is a quietly radical claim. For most of us, learning is a leaky bucket - we pour in effort and watch it drain. Schneider's whole project assumes the bucket can be fixed, that retention is a solvable engineering problem rather than a fact of being human. Whether or not he's fully right, the conviction is the thing that keeps RemNote pointed at a single horizon instead of scattering across features. He started with his own forgetting and built outward, and the people who use the product hardest tend to describe the same shift he felt: the relief of learning something and trusting it to still be there.
Spaced repetition gives you control over what you know. Learn something, apply it, and you should be able to reliably remember and use it.— Martin Schneider, on the philosophy behind RemNote
He used his own product privately for three years before he ever thought of it as a company. The startup was an afterthought of the habit.
He started an undergrad, a master's, and a PhD - all at MIT - before fully committing to the app.
On GitHub he's mfranzs, complete with an Arctic Code Vault badge for code archived in a mountain in Norway.
He once caught himself mentally reviewing flashcards while ice skating - and swears it fixed his posture on the ice.
Long before MIT, he was a kid from Dresher, Pennsylvania, by way of Upper Dublin High School.
RemNote runs as a remote-first team, small and deliberately so, optimizing the product over the org chart.