Education platform imagi provides safer access to AI for schoolkids, and it has caught the eye of VCs and celebrities alike, netting it $4.5. million in seed funding. Dora Palfi and Beatrice Ionascu helm the company from New York City.
The imagi approach is singular: students get anonymous accounts. No personal data reaches the model. Teachers, most of whom have never written a line of code, get lesson plans and setup handled for them. The result is that a school can hand students actual frontier AI tools without a lawyer in the room.
The company’s breakthrough came when Lovable, one of the fastest-growing AI app builders, needed a way into classrooms and picked imagi to do it. A student logs in through imagi and builds working software. The same gateway can carry any AI product a school wants to deploy, which is why we think of imagi less as a curriculum company and more as infrastructure that happens to ship with a curriculum.
None of this is theoretical. imagi already reaches over 700,000 students in 140 countries and operates in more than 100 US districts, including the Hawaii Department of Education.
“Providing the next generation with safe access to AI tools supervised by educators is imperative. They will be at the forefront of the technological change AI is bringing, and imagi has already delivered this for hundreds of thousands of young people across the globe. We look forward to supporting them as they continue to scale pedagogically sound access to frontier AI tools,” says Zsolt Weiszbart, Partner at Day One Capital.
imagi’s founders have been at this for eight years, since well before “AI literacy” was a phrase anyone used. They started by teaching kids Python on a pixel-art smartphone toy. Eight years of sitting in classrooms is how you learn what teachers will actually adopt versus what wins design awards, and it shows in the product.
