Edtech startup Imagi raises $4.5M to teach kids to build with AI

Dora Palfi comes from a family of teachers. “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 gives K-12 students and teachers the tools to teach and build curriculum around coding, basic computer skills, and, as of last year, AI literacy. On Thursday, the company announced the $4.5 million seed round.

Last November, Imagi announced a partnership with the vibe-coding tool Lovable that lets teachers create lessons and give students controlled access to the platform, so they can learn 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; Palfi said the company continues providing free trials and freemium access thanks to that support. Results from the partnership include a teacher who built an app translating her curriculum into 15 languages spoken in her classroom, and a student who built a website to promote his lawn-mowing business, with a calendar link so customers can book directly.

The product responds to an active debate over how AI should be used in schools and how young people should engage with it. Palfi said the teams behind OpenAI and Lovable are the experts in building frontier AI tools, while education specialists like her bring the experience and knowledge to deploy them safely in the classroom. In practice, that means every prompt and response the platform generates is screened, with violations removed before reaching the student. Imagi says it complies 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 zero data retention, and no partner trains on student data or activity. The system also trains teachers on the AI, coding, and computational tools so they can teach them to students with confidence.

“Rather than worrying about students cheating or regressing with AI, the education system has to adjust to the reality,” Palfi said. “Most kids already use AI, but we need to teach children to build with AI rather than just passively consume it.”

Since launch, Imagi has worked with more than 700,000 students across 140 countries, Palfi said. The new funding will go toward scaling into more K-12 schools, district sales, hiring, new product features, and a new platform Imagi plans to launch next month.

Why it matters

Imagi’s pitch — that schools, not just AI labs, are where kids learn to build with the technology rather than just consume it — is landing at a moment when OpenAI and Lovable are backing the model directly, betting that AI literacy taught early shapes how an entire generation approaches the job market.