🔵 Our August update: imagi announces $4.5M raise

Hi friends,

We hope you are all staying hydrated and coping well in the heat – maybe even taking a little bit of time off! Not too much of that here, we’re keeping busy learning new things and we've even announced a new investment since our last update. Events season is around the corner again, and we’re raring to go – we hope to catch up with many of you in the coming months!

This update includes:

• Investment Update – imagi's $4.5M Seed round

• Insights – New blog series called “In Plain Sight”

• Events – AI in Learning panel at TechBBQ in Copenhagen

We hope you will enjoy!

Best,
Team Brighteye

Congrats to imagi on the recent $4.5M raise - to build the safe education layer between AI tools and schools! We're super happy to have led the Seed round together with Day One Capital, with participation from Feminvest Ventures and We Are Human.

imagi has already given more than 700,000 students in 140 countries access to safe, compliant and pedagogically sound AI. The fresh funding will be used to keep expanding access to structured AI learning for students and teachers in the US and beyond.

Our Founding Partner

In the ❝Why we invested in imagi❞ write-up, Ben goes into more detail, including on the imagi opportunity and what convinced us to back the Sweden and New York-based company.

Why we invested in imagi

«In Plain Sight» is a new weekly blog from our Head of Platform & Research Rhys Spence. In each edition he focuses on a thorny topic within investing, learning and work, startups and policy.

In the first post, «Universities still treat careers like the small print» Rhys dove into how universities tell prospective students a lot about what they’ll study, but surprisingly little about where it might take them. Too often, careers appear at the bottom of a course page as a short, generic list of jobs, as though they’re an afterthought rather than one of the main reasons people choose to study.

In the second post, he looked into «When AI writing feels like lying (and when it doesn’t)». The article explores a growing backlash against AI writing, including in personal communications that “feel” AI-written. He ponders on the evolving question: What happens to how we treat each other once we can’t tell the difference between AI writing and stuff we’ve written ourselves?

In the third edition, «The rising tide of employee secondaries», out last week, Rhys looks at why giving employees some liquidity along the way when building a venture can strengthen alignment, help founders retain more ownership and recycle talent back into the startup ecosystem. He presents some benefits, potential frictions and advice on how to treat secondaries.

«In Plain Sight» is published every Thursday morning at 8am UK/9.00 CET.

Later this week «In Plain Sight» 4 focus on how children are learning about climate change in the post «Europe is burning – what should we teach the next generation?»

We loved running the Brighteye Founder Studio this spring and summer. And we loved all the amazing contributions we got from founders, senior operators and corporates sharing their knowledge. In a series of articles we will share our takes on some of the content from sessions hosted during the 12-week residency, starting this week with the GTM workshop we ran with with Meg Porter ✨ and Sophia Ahrel FCIM on how to build design partnerships that create genuine commercial insight rather than bespoke, unpaid work.

The central lesson is in the title of the blog: “Design the partnership before you sign the partner.”

That means being explicit about:
- The three to five things you need to learn
- What each side will contribute and receive
- Who can buy, who will champion and who will use the product
- How success and willingness to pay will be measured
- What happens when requests fall outside the agreed scope

Read the full post here!

We’ll be heading to Denmark very soon, kicking off the H2 events season at TechBBQ in Copenhagen next week. Isabella Vahdati and Hege Tollerud from team Brighteye will be there, and we are happy to have teamed up with Owl Ventures to co-host a Grill Session Panel on «The future of AI in Education & Learning.»

AI is already reshaping how people learn and how education is delivered, in the classroom and beyond - but what comes next, and who’s building it?

The panel brings together founders and investors at the forefront of AI in education, spanning education innovation, impact investing, and venture capital. Together, they’ll unpack how AI has already changed learning, where it’s headed next, and what founders and funders are watching closely as this space evolves.

Hear from:

Daniela Duca at Samos, Kirsten Meehan from Omnea and Brighteye’s Izzy Vahdati are excited to invite you to the first Aspiring Female Partners event of 2026. Aspiring Partners was born from a simple but urgent mission: to see more women in decision-making roles in venture capital.

Join them in London on Wednesday 9 September for a deep tech-focused panel featuring Aleksandra Pedraszewska, Partner at Vastpoint, Aurelia Liechtenstein, Co-Founder at Proximo Ventures, Isabel Zhang, Investor at HCVC, and Dr Claire Thorne, Venture Partner at Deep Science Ventures.

​The event is organised in collaboration with Lucinda Goldklang, who leads Odin’s Capital Network.

Register your interest to join here

Back in the Nordics, we are looking forward to the Nordic Edtech Summit in Oslo on 9 September. Our Head of Community & Events, Hege Tollerud will be on stage for a Hot Seat conversation with Co-Founder and CEO Hugo Wernhoff at Kognity. There are still a few spaces left, make sure you grab your ticket now!!