Imagi Raises $4.5M to Bring AI-Powered 'Vibe Coding' to K-12 Classrooms

The company is headquartered in the US with a growing international team . Palfi, who comes from a family of teachers, started Imagi to bring coding and computer science skills — and, as of 2025, AI literacy — into K-12 classrooms .

How the 'Vibe Coding' Approach Works

Imagi's signature innovation is its "vibe coding" approach, which lets students use natural language prompts to build real software without writing every line of code manually . (The term "vibe coding" was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 .)

In November 2025, Imagi partnered with Lovable — the AI coding platform formerly known as GPT Engineer — to bring vibe coding into classrooms . Teachers can create lessons and give students controlled, guardrailed access to Lovable's AI coding engine, allowing them to build real projects in a safe environment .

The results are tangible. A teacher used the platform to create an app that translates curriculum into 15 languages. A student built a website to promote his lawn-mowing business, complete with a built-in calendar for bookings .

Safety and Compliance: COPPA, FERPA, and GDPR

Given its K-12 audience, Imagi has built safety as a core design principle. The platform employs real-time content screening: every prompt and every response is filtered before reaching the student, and violations are removed immediately .

On privacy and legal compliance, Imagi addresses three major regulatory frameworks:

• COPPA compliance: The platform complies with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, meaning it does not collect or retain personal data of children under 13 without parental consent .
• FERPA compliance: It complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, protecting the privacy of student education records .
• GDPR compliance: It complies with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation with zero data retention policies — Imagi and its partners do not train on student data or activity .

What Founder Dora Palfi Says About Education and AI

Palfi has argued that the education system must stop worrying about cheating and start preparing students for a world where AI is ubiquitous.

"Rather than worrying about students cheating or regressing with AI, the education system has to adjust to the reality. Most kids already use AI, but we need to teach children to build with AI rather than just passively consume it."

She frames Imagi as a bridge between frontier AI tool builders (OpenAI, Lovable) and the educators who need to deploy those tools safely. Safe deployment in the classroom, she notes, requires deep education-domain expertise .

Expansion Plans for the $4.5M Seed Round

Imagi has already reached over 700,000 students across 140 countries . With the new capital, the company plans to:

• Scale into more K-12 schools in the US and internationally
• Invest in district-level sales and hiring
• Build out new product features and expand the platform's capabilities

The round was oversubscribed, reflecting strong investor belief that AI-native education tools are becoming a necessity, not a novelty .