Dora Palfi comes from a family of teachers. Naturally, then, “it was instilled in me that education is something that can completely alter the trajectory of your life,” she told TechCrunch.
In 2018, she and Beatrice Ionascu launched Imagi, a company that helps provide K-12 students and teachers with the tools to teach and build curriculum around coding, basic computer skills and, as of last year, AI literacy. On Thursday, the company announced a $4.5 million seed round, with investors including Brighteye Ventures, Day One Capital, and artist Wil.i.am.
Notably, last November, the company announced a partnership with the vibe coding tool Lovable that lets teachers create lessons and provide students controlled access to the platform so they can learn how to vibe code with guardrails in place. OpenAI also provided $1 million in credits so schools can access the Imagi x Lovable tool for free. “We continue providing free trials and freemium access thanks to their support,” Palfi said.
She shared some examples of what has come from the partnership so far, like the teacher who built an app that translated her curriculum to 15 different languages spoken in her classroom. The Clueless-inspired digital wardrobe app Alta was built by another graduate of the program.
“Another student built himself a website to promote his lawn-mowing business, linking to his calendar so people can book time directly on the website,” she said.
The product is, in some ways, an answer to the debate around how AI should be deployed in school and how young people should engage with this powerful technology. Speaking to TechCrunch, Palfi said that the brains behind OpenAI and Lovable are “experts in building frontier AI tools,” while education experts like herself “have the experience and knowledge to safely deploy them in the classroom.”
In this case, safe deployment means every prompt and every response generated by the platform is screened, with violations removed before they reach the student. Imagi is also in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), meaning there is zero data retention and Imagi’s partners are not training on student data and activity. The system also trains teachers how to use the AI, coding, and computational tools, so they can teach it confidently to students, Palfi said.
“Rather than worrying about students cheating or regressing with AI, the education system has to adjust to the reality,” Palfi continued. “Most kids already use AI, but we need to teach children to build with AI rather than just passively consume it.”
That’s particularly important given AI’s impact on the job markets these young students will eventually have to enter. Since not everyone has access to AI tools at home, school is often the best place to teach this new technology.
Since its launch, Imagi has worked with more than 700,000 students across 140 countries, Palfi said. This fresh capital will be used to scale into more K-12 schools, invest in district sales, hiring, building out new product features, and help launch a new platform next month.
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