A Stockholm-based education technology company called Imagi raised $4.5 million in funding on July 23, 2026. Investors included Brighteye Ventures, Day One Capital, and musician and tech investor will.i.am (TechCrunch).

Imagi was founded in 2018 by Dora Palfi and Beatrice Ionascu. It gives students and teachers tools for teaching coding, basic computer skills, and AI literacy. Since launch, the platform has reached more than 700,000 students across 140 countries. It is designed for classroom use and follows strict privacy rules meant to protect children and students — including zero data retention, meaning the company does not keep student information, and agreements that stop partners from using student data to train AI models.

What makes this funding round unusual is the product behind it. In November 2025, Imagi partnered with a company called Lovable, which makes a tool for "vibe coding." Vibe coding means you describe what you want a program to do in everyday language, and an AI writes, fixes, and adjusts the code for you. The partnership lets teachers create lessons and give students controlled access to the tool in class. OpenAI supported the effort with $1 million in credits, so schools can use the tool for free.

For adult software developers, vibe coding has been about getting work done faster. For schools, the questions are different. If the AI writes the code, do students still learn the basics of how computers and programming work? And is that tradeoff worth it if it means more students get to build working software at an earlier age?

Imagi's privacy commitments are worth noting. Zero data retention and no training on student activity are not yet standard across education technology tools that use AI. These two guarantees address the concerns school districts most often raise when considering AI tools. The free credits from OpenAI also remove a cost barrier that has kept many underfunded schools from adopting AI tools. Whether these promises hold up as the company grows and adds features is an open question, but the starting terms are strong.

The new funding will go toward expanding into more schools, building a sales team focused on school districts, hiring, adding features, and launching a new platform. The focus on district-level sales matters because public school purchasing decisions are made at the district level, and those decisions can take 12 to 18 months. Districts tend to choose vendors that can prove their tools meet legal requirements, fit classroom goals, and show measurable results.

The investors backing Imagi each bring something different. Brighteye Ventures focuses on education technology. Day One Capital has experience with early-stage European tech companies. will.i.am has advocated for STEM education access for over a decade, and his involvement fits Imagi's reach into 140 countries, many of them outside the usual education technology markets.

The wider picture is that AI coding tools are just beginning to enter K-12 classrooms. Most school districts are balancing excitement about teaching AI skills with caution about student privacy, appropriate access for children, and the risk of letting AI do too much of the learning. Imagi's approach — a controlled classroom setting, firm privacy guarantees, and free access through credits — offers one possible model for how schools could adopt these tools at scale.

The new platform Imagi plans to launch has not been described in detail, and the company has not given a timeline. What is clear is that Imagi wants to build more tools while also building the sales operation to reach larger school district buyers.

The takeaway is simple. The same AI coding tools changing how professional developers work are now entering classrooms, adapted for children with privacy protections and teaching structures around them. The generation learning to build software by describing it in words, before learning to write code by hand, will enter the workforce with a very different idea of what programming is.