Why we invested in imagi

There is an awkward fact sitting in the middle of EdTech right now. AI is rewriting how software gets built, how research gets done, how most white-collar work happens, and the average school district cannot legally put any of it in front of a ten-year-old. FERPA and COPPA were written for a different era, but they apply, and the penalty for getting it wrong lands on the district. So administrators do the rational thing: they block everything.

The market has produced two bad workarounds. The first is intro content that never goes anywhere, the Hour of Code model, a nice first hour with no second one. The second is worse: “AI education” products that are actually simulations, sandboxes where students learn about AI without ever using it. It’s the equivalent of teaching driving with a cardboard steering wheel.

imagi took the harder route. The company has built a K-12 computer science and AI curriculum, CSTA-aligned, covering grades 3 to 12, and underneath it something more interesting: an AI Gateway that is FERPA and COPPA compliant by design. Students get anonymous accounts. No personal data reaches the model. Teachers, most of whom have never written a line of code, get lesson plans and setup handled for them. The result is that a school can hand students actual frontier AI tools without a lawyer in the room.

The proof point came when Lovable, one of the fastest-growing AI app builders, needed a way into classrooms and picked imagi to do it. A student logs in through imagi and builds working software with Lovable, at age eleven, with no coding background. Lovable is one integration. The same gateway can carry any AI product a school wants to deploy, which is why we think of imagi less as a curriculum company and more as infrastructure that happens to ship with a curriculum.

None of this is theoretical. imagi already reaches over 700,000 students in 140 countries and operates in more than 100 US districts, including the Hawaii Department of Education.

"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," says Zsolt Weiszbart, Partner at Day One Capital.

imagi's founders have been at this for eight years, since well before “AI literacy” was a phrase anyone used. They started by teaching kids Python on a pixel-art smartphone toy. Eight years of sitting in classrooms is how you learn what teachers will actually adopt versus what wins design awards, and it shows in the product.

We are extremely proud to back them as Day One exists on a simple core belief:
CEE produces exceptional engineers, scientists and founders, and we back them whether they build from the region or take their ambition abroad.

Dóra and Bea are the second kind. We are not an impact fund and don’t pretend to be. But if imagi succeeds in teaching a generation to work with AI from the start, it will have mattered more than most things we will ever fund.

Check out their intro video below or the exclusive coverage by Dominic-Madori Davis on TechCrunch.