Ex-principal took hundreds of meetings to raise $63m

Adeel Khan started teaching in Atlanta Public Schools, became an assistant principal, then founded his own public high school in Denver.

In November 2022 he was a year into coaching principals at the district office and had just started what he calls a personal sabbatical. ChatGPT was released that month.

He went back to the school he founded and ran workshops with its teachers, asking them to try the tool in as many situations as they could.

Most barely touched it. A few tried and decided doing the work by hand was quicker. One or two told him it had changed how they taught.

That split was the idea. Khan wanted the technology to reach every teacher rather than the ones who enjoy new software.

MagicSchool AI is what came out of it: a platform for K-12 teachers that builds rubrics, adapts assignments for different learning levels and generates worksheets and reading material. It also lets schools give pupils monitored AI tools, from algebra tutors to writing assistants set up with state exam rubrics.

Khan describes the company as the vertical AI product for schools, the equivalent of what Harvey and Legora are doing in law.

Its customers are mostly school districts wanting a governed environment for generative AI that fits data privacy rules and local curriculum. Named partners include Denver Public Schools, and Broward County and Hillsborough County schools in Florida.

Khan says one in five children in America attends a school partnered with MagicSchool, and that roughly 8 million educators worldwide have signed up. Both figures are his own; the Gazette has not seen them broken down.

The fundraising was the hard part. Early on he used hourly contractors and had no business plan, on his own account, working on the theory that getting a lot of users first was enough.

He began pitching venture capitalists when the user base neared 1 million, and says it took "quite literally hundreds of meetings" to land an institutional investor. Investors, he says, asked whether he had gone to Stanford or worked at Google. He had neither.

Even edtech investors hesitated. Khan says he watched companies of a similar size raise seed rounds with no product and no sales while millions of teachers already knew his.

His answer was to lean on growth numbers at every stage. After angel cheques, MagicSchool raised a $2.4m seed round led by Range Ventures of Colorado. Total funding is now close to $63m, with Bain Capital Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Smash Capital and GSV Ventures among the backers. Khan says revenue grew threefold year on year at the end of last year.

He no longer runs the high school; a former founding team member does, and he says it remains one of Denver's top-performing public schools.

The lesson he draws is that the model is no longer what separates companies, and that domain knowledge applied to a specific job is. For a founder without the CV investors pattern-match against, the practical version is blunter: the traction has to arrive before the term sheet, and it may take hundreds of meetings after that.

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