imagi Raises $4.5M to Build the Safe AI Layer Between Frontier Tools and K-12 Schools

Edtech company imagi has raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital to bring structured, supervised AI learning into K-12 classrooms. The oversubscribed round, announced on 23 July 2026, also drew will.i.am, FemInvest, and We Are Human, the fund led by Kahoot’s founders.

The company already reaches more than 700,000 students across 140 countries, with district partnerships live in over 100 US school districts including the Hawaii Department of Education.

The gap imagi is built to close

The case for the company sits in two numbers. Research from CollegeBoard found that 84% of high school students already use large language models to help with schoolwork, while 45% of school administrators report that access to generative AI tools is restricted in their classrooms.

Students, in other words, are using AI regardless of school policy, just without structure, supervision, or guidance. More than 85% of administrators say AI education is valuable, yet most classrooms lack a safe way to deliver it.

How the platform works

imagi describes itself as the safe education layer between AI tools and schools. Rather than building a walled-garden model of its own, it partners with the platforms students already encounter, including OpenAI and Lovable, and wraps them in curriculum, guardrails, and teacher support.

The result is direct but supervised student access to frontier AI, delivered through curriculum-aligned lessons across computer science, STEM, art, and mathematics. Students use the Lovable and imagi platform to build their own apps and projects, learning to create with AI rather than simply cheat with it.

For districts, the value is compliance and confidence: ready-to-teach lessons, safety guardrails, and pedagogical structure that administrators can approve.

Traction and growth

imagi reports 30x year-on-year user growth and 3x growth in annual recurring revenue, with US district partnerships now live. The company has raised $5.5 million to date.

The new funding will go toward scaling across US K-12 education, integrating additional frontier AI tools, expanding teacher-training programmes, hiring US-based talent, and investing in compliance and research.

The investors and angels backing it

Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital led the round, joined by FemInvest and We Are Human. The angel roster spans founders, operators, and educators:

• Johan Brand and Jamie Brooker, founders of Kahoot
• Mati Staniszewski, founder of ElevenLabs
• Thomas Dohmke, former CEO of GitHub
• Deborah Quazzo, founder of GSV
• Laura Modiano of OpenAI
• Fredrik Hjelm, co-founder of Voi
• Sophia Amoruso, Simon Squibb, Irina Denisenko, Kaveh Rostampor, Nihal Mehta, Julia Elf, Ceyda Erten, and Gerard Espinet

Mission-aligned investors Morgan Stanley and Sparkmind Capital also participated, alongside musician and entrepreneur will.i.am.

The founders

imagi was founded in 2018 by Dora Palfi (CEO) and Beatrice Ionascu (CTO), following a user-centred research project at KTH University in Stockholm. The two first met as undergraduates at NYU Abu Dhabi, where they started a club to support women in STEM.

The company doubled down on US K-12 education in 2024 and is now headquartered in New York, with a team spanning the US, UK, Sweden, and Finland. In November 2025, Sari Hurme-Mehtälä joined as Chief Growth Officer, having previously sold her edtech company Kide Science to Accelerate Learning.

Why AI literacy is becoming the new baseline

Palfi’s framing is that today’s schoolchildren are the first generation who will never know a world without AI, making AI education less a specialist subject than a form of basic literacy.

The difficulty is that frontier AI tools were not designed with children in mind. Closing that gap, with guardrails educators and parents can trust, is the problem imagi is now funded to solve at scale.