MagicSchool believes that AI is indispensable in the classroom, so its goal is to help teachers and students use it appropriately

These days, when you hear about students and generative AI, chances are you’re getting a taste of the debate over the adoption of tools like ChatGPT. Are they helpful? (Wow! Great for research! Fast!) Or are they harmful? (Boo! Misinformation! Fraud!). But some startups are taking the arrival of generative AI in the school environment as a positive and a foregone conclusion. And they’re building products they think will meet a certain market opportunity.

Now one of them has raised some funds to fulfil that ambition.

MagicSchool AI, which is building generative AI tools for educational environments, has closed a $15 million Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Denver-based MagicSchool got its start with tools for teachers, and founder and CEO Adeel Khan said in an interview that now about 4,000 teachers and schools are using its products to plan lessons, write tests and create other learning materials.

Recently, it has also started building tools for students, which are made available through their schools. MagicSchool will use the funds to continue building on both of these tracks, as well as work on adding more clients, hiring talent, and more.

This latest round also includes backing from some very notable investors. These include Adobe Ventures (whose parent company Adobe is focusing heavily on AI across its platforms) and Common Sense Media (a specialist in age-based tech reviews that is moving into generative AI with an AI guidelines partnership with OpenAI and ratings for chatbots). Individuals involved in this round include Replit founder Amjad Masaad, Clever co-founders Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia, and Outschool co-founder Amir Nathoo. (Some of these were also early investors in the company: it previously raised around $2.4 million.)

Khan did not disclose MagicSchool’s valuation in this round, but investors believe investing in such applications is the next natural step for AI startups after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral.

“This is the era of AI for education, and there’s a huge opportunity to create assistants for both teachers and students,” Christina Melas-Kiriazi, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said in an interview. “They have an opportunity here to help teachers with lesson planning and other things that take them away from their students.”

From teacher to AI evangelist

Magicskool, despite its name, did not appear out of thin air.

Khan got his start as a teacher, working for Teach for America when he first left university. (And his interest in public service and the role of education may have begun even earlier: at Virginia Tech, he was student body president at the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, so he was unfortunately on the front lines of the ravages of gun violence.)

As a teacher, he showed early signs of an interest in both entrepreneurship and leadership when he moved to Denver with the idea of ​​starting his own school.

First working in various administrative roles in local schools, he eventually founded his own charter high school, called DSST: Conservatory Green High School, whose first group of graduates achieved 100% acceptance into four-year colleges.

The idea of ​​Magicskool came to Khan’s mind while taking a break from his busy schedule.

“It was around November of 2022 when ChatGPT was making headlines and generative AI was starting to take off in most parts of the country,” he recalls. “When I was thinking about what I would do next, I started tinkering with it and immediately I realized how much utility this new technology had for teachers.”

He did workshops on early versions of generative AI to create tools for teachers, visited schools where he had taught himself and introduced his former colleagues to the possibilities. But it wasn’t working.

He said, “The interface was too clunky for them and it wasn’t engaging.” Khan’s demo gave them the desired “wow” feeling, but left to their own devices, teachers would use it once and never again.

“They would say to me, ‘I spent so much time trying to get this thing motivated and do what I wanted to do, that it didn’t save me time, it wasted my time.’”

Their solution was to come up with more specific optimizations.

“Behind the scenes, we were actually giving some sophisticated cues, and also making sure that the results were what a teacher would expect,” he said.

Some examples of what teachers are creating with MagicSchool include lesson plans, quizzes and tests, course materials, and redesigned content geared toward more and less challenging levels of learning. MagicSchool continues to tinker with all of this. Khan said it works a lot with OpenAI’s APIs, as well as Anthropic and others. Behind the scenes, the company does AB testing to determine what works best in what scenarios, he said.

Still, convincing teachers – who weren’t paying to use the product – and then schools – who were paying – to sign on to MagicSchools wasn’t exactly straightforward.

He said, “When we launched the product I couldn’t even get a meeting with any school or district, including the school I worked at, there was so much fear about it all.” All it took was “one negative headline about the use of AI in schools … about how AI is going to take over the world and robots are going to take over” to end any conversation.

Gradually this began to change as society and industry adopted AI more widely and introduced more advanced models. He said saving time was the most obvious reason for using it, but he also found it was good for brainstorming ideas and even supplementing what he could learn on his own.

“I think teachers didn’t realize or didn’t expect what AI could do for them and for their audiences,” he said.

Beyond that, he has another argument for why it makes sense to bring more and more AI into the classroom: it will be a part of everything, so it’s the school’s job to make sure its students are ready for it.

AI is smart but it’s not ‘human smart’

That said, the use of AI in any scenario, including the classroom, has its limitations.

“AI has a very different kind of intelligence than human intelligence. Humans have developed emergent intelligence that is in some way the product of millions of years of pruning through natural selection. It’s very holistic. It’s cognitively very flexible,” said Mutlu Cukurova, a professor of education and AI at University College, London, where there’s a years-old research lab researching various permutations of AI and learning. (A very realistic conclusion from a recent paper: There has to be a hybrid approach involving both AI and humans.)

“AI is designed intelligence, not emergent intelligence. That means it is designed for a very specific goal or a set of goals. The AI ​​is very good at achieving this particular goal, and shows significant signs of intelligence, but it is a different kind of intelligence.”

This may be particularly relevant for students wondering how they will learn in an AI world, or for teachers who are not experienced enough to know that an AI version of learning materials like quizzes is not good enough.

Although Cukurova said automating certain tasks can be a valuable experiment, “it becomes problematic when teachers don’t have enough experience before to learn how to do these types of tasks themselves.”

Khan said MagicSchool aims to take care of this especially when it comes to students. He said schools control what features students get to use on the platform, and it’s clear when they’ve used MagicSchool for an assignment.

This all sounds great in theory, but ultimately the cracks can only be exposed in a stress test.

For example, will a cash-strapped school district rely on more input from AI systems during classroom time with teachers? Or how will schools be able to identify if students are using AI tools outside of class in ways that are not approved by their teachers?

Cukurova says this will require a different kind of AI education. “This is a key piece of the puzzle: how do we educate and train to use AI effectively and ethically?”