These days, when you hear about students and generative AI, you’re probably getting a taste of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they helpful?Yay! Great for research! Fast!) Or is it harmful? (Boo! Misinformation! Cheating!). But some startups see the arrival of generative AI in the school environment as a positive and foregone conclusion. They are building products to address what they believe will be a specific market opportunity.
Now someone has raised some money to make that ambition a reality.
Magic School Artificial Intelligence, which builds productive AI tools for educational environments, has closed a $15 million Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures. MagicSchool, based in Denver, started with tools for teachers, and founder and CEO Adeel Khan said in an interview that it now has about 4,000 teachers and schools using its products to plan lessons, write tests and produce other educational materials.
More recently, the company has started building tools for students as well, by making them available through their schools. MagicSchool will use the funds to continue building along these two paths, as well as work on landing more clients, hiring talent, and more.
The latest round also includes backing from some very high-profile investors. They include Adobe Ventures (whose parent company Adobe has been heavily reliant on AI on its platform) and Common Sense Media (which specializes in age-based tech reviews and has been delving into generative AI through its AI guidance partnership with OpenAI and chatbot ratings). Other individuals involved in the round include Replit founder Amjad Masad, Clever co-founders Tyler Busmini and Rafael Garcia, and OutSchool co-founder Amir Nato. (Some of these were also seed investors in the company: the company previously raised around $2.4 million.)
Khan didn’t disclose MagicSchool’s valuation in this round, but investors believe backing app bets like this is the natural next step in AI startups after the hundreds of millions pumped into infrastructure companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral.
“There’s a moment for AI in education, and a huge opportunity to build an assistant for both teachers and students,” Christina Melas-Kyriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said in an interview. “They have an opportunity here to help teachers with lesson planning and other work that takes them away from their students.”
From teacher to artificial intelligence preacher
Despite its name, the Magic School did not appear out of thin air.
Khan got his start as an educator, first working for Teach for America when he first left college. (His interest in public service and the role of education may have started even earlier: At Virginia Tech, he was student body president at one point. Virginia Tech shooting (Unfortunately, I had a front row seat to the ravages of gun violence.)
As a teacher, he showed early signs of tapping into his entrepreneurial and leadership interests when he moved to Denver with the idea of starting his own school.
He initially worked in various administrative roles at local schools, eventually founding his own high school called DSST: Conservatory Green High School, which saw its first group of graduates gain 100% acceptance into four-year colleges.
During a break from this professional activity, Khan came up with the idea for MagicSchool.
“It was around November of 2022 when ChatGPT was dominating the headlines and generative AI had entered the ether in the majority of the country,” he recalls. “While I was thinking about what I would do next, I started tinkering with it, and it immediately occurred to me how useful this new technology would be for teachers.”
He had set up workshops on early versions of using generative AI to build tools for teachers, and he had visited schools where he had taught himself and shown former colleagues the possibilities. But it wasn’t clicking.
“The interface was old-fashioned to them and not sticky,” he said. Khan’s demos inspired them with the coveted “wow” word, but if left to their own devices, teachers would use it once and never use it again.
“They would say to me: ‘I spent a lot of time trying to motivate him and get him to do what I wanted to do, and in the end it didn’t save me time, it cost me time.’”
His solution was to come up with more specific allocations.
“Behind the scenes, we were doing some really sophisticated motivation, and also making sure that the outputs were what the teacher expected,” he said.
Some examples of what teachers create with MagicSchool include lesson plans, quizzes, study materials, and reworked materials for more and less challenging learning levels. MagicSchool continues to tinker with all of this. Khan said he works a lot with OpenAI’s APIs, but also with Anthropians and others. Behind the scenes, he said, the company is doing AB testing to determine what works best in which scenarios.
However, convincing teachers – who didn’t pay to use the product – and then schools – who do pay – to sign up for MagicSchool wasn’t exactly easy.
“I couldn’t get a meeting with any school or district when we started the product, including the school I worked at, there was so much fear about all of this,” he said. All it takes is “a negative headline about AI in schools… about how AI is going to take over the world and robots” to end any conversation.
This is gradually starting to change as society and industry embrace AI more widely and roll out more advanced models. He said saving time was the most obvious reason for using it, but they also found it useful for brainstorming ideas and even providing a supplement to what they could teach themselves.
“I think teachers didn’t fully understand or anticipate what AI could do for them and for the public,” he said.
Plus, he has a second argument for why bringing more AI into classrooms makes sense: It’s going to be part of how everything is done, so it’s the school’s job to make sure its students are prepared for it.
AI is smart but not “human smart”
However, there are limitations to how AI can be used in any scenario, including the classroom.
“AI is a very different kind of intelligence from human intelligence. Humans have developed an emergent intelligence, which is in a way the product of millions of years of pruning through natural selection. It is very comprehensive. It is very flexible, cognitively,” says Mutlu Cukurova, professor of education and artificial intelligence at University College London, where a research lab has been looking at different permutations of AI and learning for years. (A very sobering conclusion from a study at University College London, 1989.) modern paper:There should be a hybrid approach that includes both AI and humans.)
“AI is designed intelligence, not emergent intelligence. That means it is designed for a very specific goal, or set of goals. AI is adept at achieving that specific goal, and it shows important signs of intelligence, but it is a different kind of intelligence.”
This may be particularly relevant to students and how they will learn in an AI world, or teachers who may not be experienced enough to know when an AI version of an educational material such as a test is not good enough.
While automating certain tasks can be a valuable use case, Cukurova said, “it becomes a problem when teachers don’t have enough experience before learning how to do this kind of thing themselves.”
MagicSchool aims to keep this in mind especially as it relates to students, Khan said. He said schools control the facilities they provide to students on the platform, and it is clear when they have used MagicSchool for an assignment.
This all sounds great in theory, but ultimately cracks may only be revealed in stress tests.
For example, would a cash-strapped school district seek to rely more heavily on AI systems during class time with teachers? Or how would schools be able to identify when students are using AI tools outside the classroom in ways their teachers have not approved?
That will require a different kind of AI education, says Cukurova. “This is an important piece of the puzzle: How can we teach and train people to use AI effectively and ethically?”