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.
“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. It performs tasks like building rubrics, differentiating assignments for varied learning levels, and generating practice worksheets and reading materials.
The platform also helps educators offer monitored AI experiences directly to students. Those experiences range from algebra tutors to writing assistants customized with state exam rubrics that deliver tailored feedback to help students revise their essays.
“You can think of MagicSchool as the vertical AI solution for K-12 schools,” Khan said. “Enterprises are adopting generative AI in other fields … Like in law, there’s Harvey and Legora that are vertical AI for legal firms. We’re kind of that, but for K-12 schools.”
Today, the company’s primary customers are school districts that want to provide a safe, governed environment for generative AI that aligns with data privacy rules and local curriculum priorities. MagicSchool now partners with large school systems, including Denver Public Schools, and Florida’s Broward County Schools and Hillsborough County Schools, as well as private institutions.
“One in five children in America go to a school that is in partnership with MagicSchool,” Khan noted. Additionally, roughly 8 million educators worldwide have signed up for the platform, he said.
The uphill battle to raise capital
Despite the platform’s rapid adoption, Khan’s path to raising capital for MagicSchool was a challenge. In the beginning, he worked with hourly contractors and lacked a formal business model.
“I had no real business plan,” Khan said. “The most successful tech companies from my perspective as a consumer were the ones that just got a lot of users, and that was my goal — I was like ‘let’s just get a lot of people using this, and we’ll figure it out from there.’ ”
Once MagicSchool’s user base neared 1 million, Khan began pitching venture capitalists. However, when compared to standard Silicon Valley profiles, his background as an educator initially proved to be a hurdle rather than a selling point.
“Nobody wanted to give a former principal money,” Khan said, recalling “quite literally hundreds of meetings” before securing an institutional investor.
“I think that investors are taught to pattern match,” he noted. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, well, did you go to Stanford? Are you a tech person? Did you work at Google? ‘… I have none of those things on my resume.”
Even edtech-focused investors were hesitant, leaving Khan frustrated as he watched other founders secure millions based purely on tech-heavy resumes.
“I remember seeing other edtech companies right around our size raise seed rounds … with no product, no sales, no nothing,” he recalled. “ I would think, ‘People know what our product is. Millions of teachers know what our product is, and nobody’s heard of that one.’ ”
To overcome the skepticism, Khan relied strictly on impressive growth metrics, convincing investors during every fundraising stage that the business’ “traction was undeniable.”
The strategy paid off. Following early angel investor checks, MagicSchool went on to raise a $2.4 million seed round led by Colorado-based Range Ventures. To date, the company has raised nearly $63 million in total funding, driven by strong financial growth, including 3x year-over-year revenue growth at the end of last year, according to Khan. The startup’s other backers include Bain Capital Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Smash Capital and GSV Ventures.
Expertise as the next wave of innovation
Although Khan no longer manages the high school he founded, he stays connected to the classroom through district visits. The school remains a top-performing public school in Denver under a former founding team member, he noted.
“Of course, I miss that,” Khan admits. “There’s nothing that can replace the relationship you build over a long period of time with students.”
Yet, his deep-rooted experience in education ultimately became MagicSchool’s greatest asset — a trend Khan sees taking hold across the broader AI landscape as domain experts step up to build industry-specific tools.
“I think that what we’ve learned over time is that the model is no longer the differentiator,” Khan says. “How you contextualize the model with the real problems that people have in the work that they’re doing, and specific expertise, is the thing that’s going to unlock the next wave of innovation and impact for generative AI.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
