imagi seed round brings in $4.5M for classroom AI safety

imagi seed round financing has brought in $4.5 million for the K-12 edtech company, which sells schools a supervised way to put generative AI tools in front of students. The oversubscribed seed was led by Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital, with OpenAI and Lovable staff among the angel investors, according to the company.

The round also included FemInvest and We Are Human, the fund started by Kahoot’s founders. Angel backers named by imagi include ElevenLabs founder Mati Staniszewski, former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm, will.i.am, Sophia Amoruso, Simon Squibb, and executives from OpenAI, Spotify and Lovable. imagi did not disclose its valuation or headcount. The new round brings total funding to $5.5 million.

What does imagi do?

imagi does not build its own foundation models. The company offers curriculum, teacher training and a control layer around AI tools from partners including OpenAI and Lovable, so students use them inside a school-approved structure rather than through unsupervised consumer access.

That positioning matters because the company’s main AI partners also have employees investing in it. For school districts, the commercial question is whether imagi can be viewed as a neutral safety and curriculum provider while working closely with the labs whose tools it is helping bring into classrooms.

CEO and co-founder Dora Palfi said AI was not designed for children and argued that schools need tested products with guardrails trusted by teachers and parents. OpenAI’s head of founder experience, Laura Modiano, said imagi’s technology could help make AI instruction more widely available to students. Lovable co-founder and CTO Fabian Hedin said software development is changing rather than disappearing, and that students should learn about it safely.

How did imagi get here?

imagi was founded in Stockholm in 2018 by Palfi and CTO Beatrice Ionascu after they met at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The company is now based in New York and works across the US, UK, Sweden and Finland. Its original product, imagiCharm, was a wearable aimed at making coding more appealing to teenage girls, especially around the age when many lose interest in programming.

In 2024, the company shifted its focus toward K-12 AI education in the US. In November 2025, imagi appointed Sari Hurme-Mehtälä, founder of Kide Science, as chief growth officer.

The company says it has reached more than 700,000 students in 140 countries. It also claims user growth is up 30 times year over year and annual recurring revenue has tripled, though it did not disclose the revenue base. imagi says it has partnerships in more than 100 US school districts, including Hawaii’s state education department.

Why are edtech investors still funding K-12 AI?

The round comes during a sharp pullback in education technology funding. Rest of World reported that global edtech investment fell from $16.7 billion in 2021 to less than $3 billion by 2025, and that K-12 funding is down 82%. It also reported that 645 education companies launched in 2025, compared with nearly 10,500 in 2020.

Brighteye Ventures has also tracked a decline in funding to female-only and mixed founding teams in UK edtech, from 23% in 2022 to 17% in 2023. imagi’s female-founded status gives the round another point of contrast with the broader funding market.

The company plans to use the capital to add more advanced AI tools, expand teacher training, hire in the US, and put money into compliance and research. Those are necessary costs if imagi wants district buyers to treat it as infrastructure rather than another classroom app. The category already includes companies such as Kira Learning, which has raised $21 million without the same stated overlap between AI tool partners and investors.

This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.