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

imagi has raised $4.5 million in a seed round that was oversubscribed. Angel investors include staff from OpenAI and Lovable, according to the company.
OpenAI and Lovable are imagi’s main classroom partners, and now their staff are also among imagi’s investors.
Global K-12 edtech funding has dropped by 82% since 2021. Investors believe this close partnership model can still grow despite the downturn.

imagi presents itself as a safety layer between advanced AI tools and schools. Its list of investors shows that the labs behind these tools want a say in how imagi develops.

The edtech startup, which was founded in Stockholm and is now based in New York, raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital. Other investors include FemInvest and We Are Human, a fund started by Kahoot’s founders.

Angel investors include 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.

“Today’s schoolchildren are the first generation who will never know a world without AI. AI is not designed with children in mind. We need safe, tested AI education for children, with guardrails trusted by educators and parents,” says Dora Palfi, imagi’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

“AI is accelerating faster than any technology before, so we cannot bury our heads in the sand or ignore the need to introduce children to AI responsibly. Working with Lovable and OpenAI, we’ve engaged hundreds of thousands of young people, and with our latest funding and growing roster of partners, we hope to give millions more access to safe frontier AI tools,” she adds.

From working to close the gender gap in coding to making sure AI is used safely in classrooms

imagi’s story is different from most AI startups. Co-founders Palfi and Beatrice Ionascu, now the chief technology officer, met at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. They started imagi in 2018 as an all-female team focused on why teenage girls often lose interest in coding around age fourteen.

Their first product, imagiCharm, was a wearable device designed to make coding more fun for girls. This mission fits a larger trend: gender diversity in edtech funding is falling, with funding for female-only and mixed teams in the UK dropping from 23% in 2022 to 17% in 2023, according to Brighteye Ventures’ research.

In 2024, imagi shifted its focus to K-12 education in the US, still working to help underserved students by tackling unsupervised and unsafe AI use in classrooms. In November 2025, imagi named Sari Hurme-Mehtälä, who founded Kide Science, as chief growth officer. The team now works in the US, UK, Sweden, and Finland.

imagi does not create its own AI models. Instead, it offers a curriculum and safety layer built on tools from OpenAI and Lovable. This gives K-12 students supervised, structured access to generative AI, instead of the unsupervised access that is common now.

Laura Modiano, OpenAI’s head of founder experience, a role Tech Funding News profiled in June as part of OpenAI’s efforts to connect with startups, gave a supportive quote for imagi’s announcement.

“The goal of education has always been to help young people succeed in the world they’re growing into, and today learning to navigate AI should be at the very top of the agenda. imagi’s technology will help make high-quality AI teaching available to every student,” she says.

Fabian Hedin, Lovable’s co-founder and chief technology officer, adds, “Teaching young people coding and computing has often lagged behind the pace of technological change. In the AI era, students and teachers keep on asking if software engineering will even exist in the future. Software development is transforming, not disappearing, and we’re glad to be partnering with imagi to ensure that the first truly AI-native generation can safely learn about the cutting edge of technology.”

An oversubscribed round in a shrinking sector

Global edtech investment reached $16.7 billion in 2021 but dropped to less than $3 billion by 2025, according to Rest of World. K-12 funding is down 82% as investors move toward AI tools and workforce training with clearer returns. Fewer founders are starting education companies: only 645 launched in 2025, compared to almost 10,500 in 2020.

Given this backdrop, an oversubscribed seed round shows that imagi’s investors think a safety-focused company, partly funded by the labs it works with, is the best way forward, even compared to independent companies like Kira Learning, which has raised $21 million without the same investor overlap.

Benoit Wirz, founding partner at Brighteye Ventures, says, “Dora, Sari and Beatrice have built a product that schools can actually trust, and the traction they’ve achieved so far speaks for itself.”

Zsolt Weiszbart, partner at Day One Capital, adds, “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.”

A teacher’s view supports this idea. Lisa Haines, a STEM teacher in Indiana, says: “Within weeks of introducing imagi into my classroom, my students weren’t just building apps for educational purposes, but for their friends, for their families, and for anyone with a problem that needed solving. Seeing the shift in their mindsets from consumers to creators is the true power of AI in education. With imagi, I knew my students were learning in a safe, structured environment, where trust is an imperative.”

imagi says it has reached over 700,000 students in 140 countries, with user growth up 30 times year-on-year and annual recurring revenue tripling. It has partnerships in more than 100 US school districts, including Hawaii’s state education department. The company plans to use the new funding to add more advanced AI tools, expand teacher training, grow its US team, and invest in compliance and research to make imagi the default safe choice for school district leaders. This brings imagi’s total funding to $5.5 million.

The real test of this funding round is not imagi’s growth, but whether administrators, after looking at the list of investors, still see imagi as independent from the labs it is supposed to oversee.