Meet the Utah tech company that just closed one of the biggest funding rounds in state history

Caleb Hicks, SchoolAI founder, poses for a portrait at SchoolAI headquarters in Lehi on Feb. 1, 2024. In just over two years, SchoolAI has grown into a $32 million company, driven largely by its latest funding round of $25 million.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

SchoolAI, co-founded by Caleb Hicks in 2023, raised $25 million in its latest funding round, good for one of Utah's largest Series A rounds.
The AI platform supports teachers with personalized learning tools in over 400 school districts.
SchoolAI aims to expand globally and enhance educational data infrastructure with the new funding.

LEHI — What started in a room above Caleb Hicks' Lehi garage two years ago has grown into a company that's raised $32 million to date, driven largely by its latest funding round of $25 million — one of the largest Series A funding rounds in Utah history.

Hicks also co-founded his company at a time when the very product he was selling — artificial intelligence — was being banned in school districts across the nation.

"It is so hard to reach every student. I taught seven to eight periods a day and had 42 desks in my classroom. You can't even know that many people, let alone find a way to talk to them at their level or customize something based on what they're interested in, or find a way to connect with them," said Hicks, a former teacher at Lehi Junior High School.

Feeling the burnout that many teachers across the nation are feeling, Hicks decided to do something about it. In January 2023, he cofounded SchoolAI alongside Kevin Morrill, SchoolAI's vice president of partnerships with schools and districts.

What is SchoolAI?

The platform offers over 150,000 spaces with AI tutors, interactive games, simulations, well-being check-ins and a library of grade- and subject-specific activities. Teachers also benefit from dashboards with real-time feedback and moderation, allowing them to easily track student progress and develop tailored learning plans to meet students where they are.

"It's like a tutor for students and teacher's aid for teachers," said Anthony Godfrey, superintendent of Jordan School District, one of the many Utah districts to adopt SchoolAI in its classrooms.

Today, it's used by teachers and students in more than 1 million classrooms across all 50 U.S. states and over 80 countries worldwide. The platform is embedded in more than 400 school districts through strategic partnerships that train teachers and students how to use AI in a safe, managed way.

In Utah, its clientele includes Jordan School District, Alpine School District, Granite School District, Weber School District and more, with 80% of the schools and districts in the state entered into a strategic partnership with the company.

And no, it's not another AI product that will help students shortcut through their academics, and it certainly won't replace the jobs of teachers. Hicks is very adamant about that, saying the role of the teacher in a classroom gets even more important with the introduction of AI.

"Even if a teacher is somehow able to become superhuman and be able to spend individual time with all of those students, there are still limitations in the classroom," Morrill said. "It's really, really challenging to be an educator."

Caleb Hicks, SchoolAI founder, and Cahlan Sharp, SchoolAI chief technical officer, work at SchoolAI headquarters in Lehi on Feb. 1, 2024. SchoolAI has grown into a $32 million company, driven largely by its latest funding round of $25 million. (Photo: Kristin Murphy, Deseret News)

So, SchoolAI helps teachers with things that might seem impossible on their own.

Hicks remembers a specific story from a teacher in the Jordan School District who no longer felt like he could connect with students and had begun to feel like his job was mostly comprised of busy work. Facing burnout and a potential career change, the teacher was part of the district's SchoolAI pilot program.

"He used these tools that we made that made things like lesson planning, that made things like adapting content to different reading levels easier, (and) that translated his content into the nine or 10 different languages that his students spoke at home," Hicks said. "This thing that he used to — either he wasn't able to do at all or would take his evenings and weekends, he now is able to do before he left the school building."

SchoolAI can also create assignments calibrated to individual students' needs. For example, if a student is having trouble with run-on sentences, SchoolAI can create exercises to practice correcting run-on sentences — all while tailoring the lessons to the student's reading level and personal interests.

After using SchoolAI and seeing how he was able to better connect with students, the teacher from Hicks' story decided to stay in the classroom, telling Hicks he was "more excited to teach than I have been since I started."

Homegrown

Everyone knows that teachers are extremely busy, constantly juggling multiple responsibilities at the same time. So, how did they feel when SchoolAI first began integrating into classrooms in August 2023? Hicks said the reactions were "such a mixed bag — excitement, but so much apprehension at the same time."

"There are real reasons that teachers continue to be nervous about AI in the classroom," he said. "You have to be very intentional about AI being a tool... not being something for cheating, but something that pushes you to learn."

Two things that helped its initial reception were SchoolAI's roots as a Lehi-based company and the support it received on the state level. Hicks said the Beehive State is "leading the way" when it comes to integrating AI into education.

"There is something special happening in Utah around students getting access to this technology, really, before almost anybody else," Hicks said.

And, unlike other education-tech companies, SchoolAI has a presence in the classrooms it's used in.

"Everyone that is working with the schools, they go out into the schools at least once a month to be able to go and remember what it's like to be in the classroom," Hicks said.

What's next?

While Hicks is proud of the work SchoolAI has done to both save teachers time and increase learning outcomes for students, he thinks there's more meat on the bone of what the company can be.

Part of that could be due to the success of its latest funding round, led by Insight Partners, a global venture capital firm that has invested in other successful Utah companies like Qualtrics, Instructure, Pluralsight and BILL (formerly Divvy).

Another part of it is due to the ambition Hicks, Morrill and the rest of the SchoolAI team share.

"We are not (just) building little toys for teachers to save time. We think it's valiant, it's wonderful to save teachers time so that they can show up more prepared and more ready in the classroom and love their job again," Hicks said. "That's a very important part of what we're building."

But that's not all.

Part of what the company will do with funds from its latest round includes continuing the buildout of what Hicks called "spaces" — which are essentially long-term AI "sidekicks" that can follow students from grade to grade and personalize their education over time. The other is "making sure that schools have a new type of data."

"Really understanding how students are doing, what the experience of a student is in the classroom, and being able to rally all of the school's resources to be able to support and reach every kid. That's, like, very serious, infrastructure-level work that requires deep investment to get it right," Hicks said.

In the meantime, Hicks said SchoolAI will continue scaling to more schools across the globe and is even dipping its toes into the realm of higher education to continue bringing "the impact of the work that we're doing to more people."

Correction: A previous version incorrectly said SchoolAI was a $32 million company. Instead, it has raised $32 million to date.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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