‘Nobody Wanted to Give A Former Principal Money’: How An Educator Built An Edtech AI Startup With $63M From VCs

figure — editor’s note: The following is the first profile in a series of articles in coming weeks about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. In November 2022, Adeel Khan was doing something rare for a longtime educator: taking time off.

Having launched his career as a teacher in Atlanta Public Schools, Khan became an assistant principal before founding his own public high school in Denver. After a year spent coaching principals at the district office, he decided to take a “personal sabbatical.” Then, ChatGPT came out. Khan began tinkering with the new technology, fascinated by its potential. Adeel Khan, founder of MagicSchool AI. (Courtesy photo) “I actually went out to my old school building, the one that I founded, and started using it with teachers,” Khan recalls. He ran workshops and asked the educators to use the tool in as many scenarios as possible. The responses were varied. Most teachers barely touched it. A few tried, but felt doing the work manually was faster. However, some had a lightbulb moment. “There were one or two teachers who told me, ‘This has completely revolutionized the way I teach,’ ” Khan said in an interview with Crunchbase News. Seeing that divide sparked something in him. “I thought this technology could impact every teacher, not just teachers who are really enthusiastic about using new technologies,” Khan said. “So the task then was, ‘How can we take all the power of this new technology and make it really accessible to teachers?’ ” Building the ‘vertical AI’ for K-12 That experiment set the groundwork for MagicSchool AI, a platform designed as an all-in-one AI operating system for K-12 educators and students. For teachers, the tool acts as a daily assistant.