Female-founded edtech imagi raises $4.5M seed from OpenAI and Lovable execs to bring safe AI to classrooms — TFN

• imagi has raised $4.5 million in a seed spherical that was oversubscribed. Angel traders embrace workers from OpenAI and Lovable, in accordance with the corporate.
• OpenAI and Lovable are imagi’s essential classroom companions, and now their workers are additionally amongst imagi’s traders.
• International Ok-12 edtech funding has dropped by 82% since 2021. Buyers imagine this shut partnership mannequin can nonetheless develop regardless of the downturn.

imagi presents itself as a security layer between superior AI instruments and colleges. Its record of traders exhibits that the labs behind these instruments desire a say in how imagi develops.

The edtech startup, which was based in Stockholm and is now based mostly in New York, raised $4.5 million in a seed spherical led by Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital. Different traders embrace FemInvest and We Are Human, a fund began by Kahoot’s founders.

Angel traders embrace ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski, former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm, will.i.am, entrepreneurs Sophia Amoruso and Simon Squibb, and executives from OpenAI, Spotify, and Lovable.

“Right this moment’s schoolchildren are the primary era who won’t ever know a world with out AI. AI is just not designed with kids in thoughts. We’d like secure, examined AI training for youngsters, with guardrails trusted by educators and fogeys,” says Dora Palfi, imagi’s co-founder and chief govt officer.

“AI is accelerating quicker than any know-how earlier than, so we can not bury our heads within the sand or ignore the necessity to introduce kids to AI responsibly. Working with Lovable and OpenAI, we’ve engaged a whole bunch of 1000’s of younger folks, and with our newest funding and rising roster of companions, we hope to provide thousands and thousands extra entry to secure frontier AI instruments,” she provides.

From working to shut the gender hole in coding to creating certain AI is used safely in lecture rooms

imagi’s story is totally different from most AI startups. Co-founders Palfi and Beatrice Ionascu, now the chief know-how officer, met at KTH Royal Institute of Expertise in Stockholm. They began imagi in 2018 as an all-female staff targeted on why teenage ladies typically lose curiosity in coding round age fourteen.

Their first product, imagiCharm, was a wearable system designed to make coding extra enjoyable for ladies. This mission matches a bigger pattern: gender diversity in edtech funding is falling, with funding for female-only and blended groups within the UK dropping from 23% in 2022 to 17% in 2023, in accordance with Brighteye Ventures’ analysis.

In 2024, imagi shifted its focus to Ok-12 training within the US, nonetheless working to assist underserved college students by tackling unsupervised and unsafe AI use in lecture rooms. In November 2025, imagi named Sari Hurme-Mehtälä, who based Kide Science, as chief development officer. The staff now works within the US, UK, Sweden, and Finland.

imagi doesn’t create its personal AI fashions. As a substitute, it gives a curriculum and security layer constructed on instruments from OpenAI and Lovable. This provides Ok-12 college students supervised, structured entry to generative AI, as a substitute of the unsupervised entry that’s frequent now.

Laura Modiano, OpenAI’s head of founder expertise, a job Tech Funding Information profiled in June as a part of OpenAI’s efforts to attach with startups, gave a supportive quote for imagi’s announcement.

“The objective of training has all the time been to assist younger folks succeed on the earth they’re rising into, and right this moment studying to navigate AI needs to be on the very prime of the agenda. imagi’s know-how will assist make high-quality AI educating out there to each pupil,” she says.

Fabian Hedin, Lovable’s co-founder and chief know-how officer, provides, “Instructing younger folks coding and computing has typically lagged behind the tempo of technological change. Within the AI period, college students and academics carry on asking if software program engineering will even exist sooner or later. Software program growth is reworking, not disappearing, and we’re glad to be partnering with imagi to make sure that the primary actually AI-native era can safely be taught concerning the chopping fringe of know-how.”

An oversubscribed spherical in a shrinking sector

International edtech funding reached $16.7 billion in 2021 however dropped to lower than $3 billion by 2025, in accordance with Rest of World. Ok-12 funding is down 82% as traders transfer towards AI instruments and workforce coaching with clearer returns. Fewer founders are beginning training firms: solely 645 launched in 2025, in comparison with nearly 10,500 in 2020.

Given this backdrop, an oversubscribed seed spherical exhibits that imagi’s traders assume a safety-focused firm, partly funded by the labs it really works with, is one of the best ways ahead, even in comparison with impartial firms like Kira Studying, which has raised $21 million with out the identical investor overlap.

Benoit Wirz, founding associate at Brighteye Ventures, says, “Dora, Sari and Beatrice have constructed a product that colleges can really belief, and the traction they’ve achieved up to now speaks for itself.”

Zsolt Weiszbart, associate at Day One Capital, provides, “Offering the subsequent era with secure entry to AI instruments supervised by educators is crucial. They are going to be on the forefront of the technological change AI is bringing, and imagi has already delivered this for a whole bunch of 1000’s of younger folks throughout the globe. We stay up for supporting them as they proceed to scale pedagogically sound entry to frontier AI instruments.”

A instructor’s view helps this concept. Lisa Haines, a STEM instructor in Indiana, says: “Inside weeks of introducing imagi into my classroom, my college students weren’t simply constructing apps for academic functions, however for his or her pals, for his or her households, and for anybody with an issue that wanted fixing. Seeing the shift of their mindsets from customers to creators is the true energy of AI in training. With imagi, I knew my college students have been studying in a secure, structured atmosphere, the place belief is an crucial.”

imagi says it has reached over 700,000 college students in 140 nations, with person development up 30 instances year-on-year and annual recurring income tripling. It has partnerships in additional than 100 US faculty districts, together with Hawaii’s state training division. The corporate plans to make use of the brand new funding so as to add extra superior AI instruments, increase instructor coaching, develop its US staff, and put money into compliance and analysis to make imagi the default secure selection for college district leaders. This brings imagi’s complete funding to $5.5 million.

The actual take a look at of this funding spherical is just not imagi’s development, however whether or not directors, after wanting on the record of traders, nonetheless see imagi as impartial from the labs it’s imagined to oversee.