Utah’s SchoolAI just nabbed $25M in new funding. Here’s why the timing couldn’t be better

Utah-based SchoolAI has been ahead of the curve when it comes to developing AI tools for educators and students, having launched in 2023 and, so far, deploying its platform to more than 1 million classrooms across all 50 U.S. states and over 80 countries worldwide.

An executive order issued earlier this week by President Donald Trump, Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth, only served to underscore a tenet well understood by SchoolAI’s founders from its inception: that AI competence is emerging as a must-have skill for today’s students.

“The basic idea of this executive order is to ensure that we properly train the workforce of the future by ensuring that school children, young Americans, are adequately trained in AI tools, so that they can be competitive in the economy years from now into the future, as AI becomes a bigger and bigger deal,” said Will Scharf, White House staff secretary, on Wednesday, per a report from The Hill.

How SchoolAI empowers teachers, students

In a Deseret News interview, SchoolAI founder and CEO Caleb Hicks said a critical first step in empowering students with AI literacy is ensuring that teachers themselves are ready to guide and support their classes in understanding and using a technology that has advanced at breakneck speed the past few years.

“Teachers have to know what the technology is, what it’s good at, what it’s capable of and what it’s not right for,” Hicks, a veteran Utah teacher himself, said. “Teachers need to learn how to use it responsibly before it goes into students’ hands.”

Thanks to a fresh $25 million in funding announced earlier this month, SchoolAI is poised to deploy its education-focused AI tools to an even wider audience, and build AI literacy skills for millions of new students, as it continues to advance its innovative platform.

At the heart of the effort, Hicks said, is “empowering educators” and creating tools that help recognize and support each student on their personal education journey.

“Teachers and schools are navigating hard challenges with shrinking budgets, teacher shortages, growing class sizes, and ongoing recovery from pandemic-related learning gaps,” Hicks said in an announcement of SchoolAI’s new funding round on April 2. “It’s harder than ever to understand how every student is really doing. Teachers deserve powerful tools to help extend their impact, not add to their workload. This funding helps us double down on connecting the dots for teachers and students, and later this year, bringing school administrators and parents at home onto the platform as well.”

What does SchoolAI do?

SchoolAI reports teachers, instructional coaches and school leaders have created over 150,000 custom tools using the SchoolAI platform to address their own classroom and institutional challenges.

SchoolAI’s platform has features including:

• Teacher-designed AI ‘Spaces’ that adapt to each student’s interests, learning pace and style.
• Easy-to-use AI assistants that help teachers prepare for class: lesson planning, targeted assessments, personalized feedback and other administrative tasks — freeing teachers to focus on meaningful student connection while staying aligned to district and state standards.
• Support for more than 99 languages for supporting multilingual students, has real-time text-to-speech and speech-to-text for younger students, custom instructions for targeted student accommodations and additional accessibility features for easy reading and writing.
• Real-time dashboards that can surface actionable data and insights, revealing which students need academic or other support, help students stay on track, flag concerns and raise opportunities to improve future lessons.
• Integration directly with established platforms like Canvas, PowerSchool and Google Classroom so teachers can use AI with the tools they and their students are already using.
• A safe, managed and secure learning environment fully compliant with FERPA and COPPA regulations, with SOC 2 certification providing the highest standards of data protection for students and schools.

Hicks said SchoolAI has been “built with Utah” and notes the state is leading the way when it comes to responsibly integrating AI toolkits and education in local curriculums. Hicks notes that some 80% of Utah school districts are currently using SchoolAI to build their students’ AI competency and proficiency.

Among the early adopters of SchoolAI was Jordan School District, which announced early last year that it was making the platform available at all of its 67 schools, home to more than 3,300 educators and almost 60,000 students. The district has since earned a Distinguished District award from the International Society for Technology in Education for their work bringing AI to students.

“Partnering with SchoolAI has allowed us to introduce a tool in the classroom that provides teachers with valuable insights into their students’ progress in every class,” Dr. Anthony Godfrey, superintendent of Jordan School District, said in a statement. “SchoolAI makes it easy to help students in a way that wasn’t possible before, in a scalable way that makes sure our teachers can do more amazing work without being overburdened or burnt out.”

Following the announcement of the president’s new effort to promote AI literacy in schools, SchoolAI has launched a new five-week AI readiness program, available at no charge to provide educators “a low-risk way to explore AI-powered tools and professional development in real learning environments.”