What are the top AI in education startups by total funding raised?

Top startups in the AI in Education market ranked by total funding raised

Here is an updated table that ranks the top startups in the AI in Education market based on the total amount of funding they have raised to date.

The table also includes the total number of funding rounds, the date and size of the latest round, the financing type (e.g. Series A, equity financing), key investors, the startup’s current status (active, IPO, acquired, or shut down), and a confidence score based on the data collected (we excluded startups with very low data confidence, to make sure everything is reliable).

If you need to dig deeper and get more detailed data, please check our report covering the AI in Education market.

Preply and AMBOSS currently sit at the top of the AI in Education funding ranking, followed by Riiid and Squirrel AI.

Using the figures in our dataset, Preply has raised about $293 million and AMBOSS about $291 million. Riiid follows at roughly $247 million, while Squirrel AI is above $189 million. DreamBox Learning, Speak, Knewton, Brainly and Mathpresso/QANDA form the next big group.

The gap after the leaders gets large very quickly. Our dataset contains roughly $3.28 billion of reported funding across 93 companies. The top five account for about $1.19 billion, while the top ten account for around $1.90 billion. In other words, roughly 58% of all the funding in this ranking went to just ten companies.

There is another important split inside that top ten. Riiid, DreamBox and Knewton raised most of their capital during earlier generations of edtech and adaptive learning. Preply, Speak and several companies further down the ranking are benefiting from the newer AI investment cycle. Cumulative funding tells us who raised the most historically; recent rounds show where investors are moving now.

Rank	Startup	Funding in dataset	Latest major round
1	Preply	$293M	$150M Series D
2	AMBOSS	$291M	€240M financing
3	Riiid	$247M	$175M Series D
4	Squirrel AI	$189M+	Series C2
5	DreamBox Learning	$173M	$130M Series C
6	Speak	$166M	$78M Series C
7	Knewton	$162M	$5M Series G
8	Brainly	$149M	$80M Series D
9	Mathpresso / QANDA	$134M+	$8M strategic investment
10	Liulishuo	$95M	$54M Series C

How much funding has Preply raised?

Preply has raised roughly $300 million in equity funding and is currently one of the two best-funded active companies in our AI in Education ranking.

Its biggest jump came with a $150 million Series D led by WestCap. Preply said the financing valued the company at $1.2 billion. The business now connects learners with more than 100,000 tutors across 180 countries and more than 90 languages.

The exact lifetime total varies between databases because Preply has also used debt financing. Our ranking keeps the cumulative equity figure separate from that debt rather than simply adding every financing announcement together.

What is more striking is how large the latest round was relative to Preply's previous fundraising. A single $150 million Series D is bigger than the entire cumulative funding of Brainly, QANDA, MagicSchool AI or Knowunity. Roughly half of Preply's equity capital arrived in its latest major round.

That is a much stronger fundraising position than most education startups have today.

Is AMBOSS really almost as well funded as Preply?

Yes. AMBOSS has raised roughly the same amount of capital as Preply, although the two companies are building very different businesses.

AMBOSS completed a €240 million financing with KIRKBI, M&G Investments and Lightrock joining as long-term investors. That one transaction represents the vast majority of the capital attributed to AMBOSS in our ranking.

AMBOSS started with medical education, but its market has expanded well beyond students. The company now builds clinical decision-support products for practicing healthcare professionals and has been adding AI tools for both learning and clinical work.

That helps explain a financing of this size. An investor backing AMBOSS today is getting exposure to medical education, professional knowledge tools and clinical software rather than a conventional student learning app alone.

AMBOSS is unusual in this ranking for exactly that reason: its funding total is nearly $300 million, while the business increasingly overlaps with healthcare software as much as traditional edtech.

Why is Riiid still one of the most funded AI education startups?

Riiid remains near the top because its $175 million Series D was one of the biggest AI education rounds ever completed.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led that round in 2021, long before generative AI made AI tutoring one of the most crowded startup categories. It pushed Riiid's cumulative funding to roughly $247 million in our dataset.

That single round is larger than everything Speak had raised before its Series C. It is nearly three times MagicSchool AI's cumulative funding and about eight times SchoolAI's.

Riiid shows how large some pre-ChatGPT bets on educational AI already were. The technology focus was different: prediction, adaptive learning and test preparation were central, while today's companies often start with conversational models, AI agents or generated content.

Riiid still ranks highly by cumulative funding, although the freshest large checks are now going to a different group of companies.

Are the best-funded AI education startups actually new AI companies?

Mostly no. Many of the biggest companies in the AI in Education ranking were already established before the current generative-AI boom.

Preply began as a tutoring marketplace. Brainly built a huge homework-help community. DreamBox worked on adaptive mathematics. Knewton became known for personalized learning technology. Mathpresso built QANDA around OCR and math problem solving. AMBOSS had already built a large medical learning platform.

Newer AI-native companies appear further down because they have simply had less time to accumulate capital. MagicSchool AI is around $62 million in our dataset, SchoolAI about $32 million, Gizmo about $26 million, Oboe about $20 million and Nectir about $19 million. Old names and AI-native newcomers do not always compete for the same buyers, which market maps help sort out in our report on AI education.

That age gap makes the cumulative ranking look more traditional than the current market actually is.

Today, investors are funding both sides: established education companies adding increasingly powerful AI products and younger businesses that were designed around generative AI from day one.

Which newer AI education startups are raising money fastest right now?

Magma Math, Yoodli, Gizmo, Oboe and Medly AI are among the clearest recent examples of AI education startups moving quickly from small funding bases to much larger rounds.

Magma Math raised a $40 million Series A led by Five Elms Capital. That is already more capital in one round than dozens of companies in our dataset have raised during their entire existence.

Gizmo followed with a $22 million Series A after growing to more than 13 million users across over 120 countries. The company had about 300,000 users when TechCrunch covered it several years earlier, so its audience had grown by more than 40 times before the latest financing.

Yoodli moved even faster between rounds. The company announced a Series A and then a $40 million Series B only months later, bringing cumulative funding to nearly $60 million.

Oboe raised a $16 million Series A just three months after launching its AI course-generation product. Medly AI, meanwhile, secured another $8 million after reaching more than 400,000 students.

These companies are still far below Preply or Riiid in cumulative dollars, but their fundraising pace looks much more like the AI education market of 2025 and 2026.

Startup	Recent round	Approx. total funding	Recent traction
Yoodli	$40M Series B	Nearly $60M	Series B only months after Series A
Magma Math	$40M Series A	$50M+	Used by school systems across 30+ U.S. states
Gizmo	$22M Series A	~$26M	13M+ learners
Oboe	$16M Series A	~$20M	Raised three months after product launch
Nectir	$12.5M Series A	~$19M	Focused on higher education
Medly AI	$8M	~$10M	400,000+ students
SchoolAI	$25M Series A	~$32M	1M classrooms reported by OpenAI

What are the biggest funding rounds ever raised in AI education?

The largest AI education rounds reach well into nine figures, but there are only a handful of them.

AMBOSS's €240 million financing is one of the biggest transactions in the dataset. Riiid raised $175 million in its Series D, Preply raised $150 million in its Series D, and DreamBox Learning raised $130 million from The Rise Fund.

Lingokids also announced $120 million in new financing, although that deal needs careful treatment because the company described it as a combination of equity and go-to-market investment. We therefore cannot simply add the full headline amount to an equity-only ranking.

Further down, $40 million to $80 million has become an important range for companies that have already shown real adoption. Brainly raised $80 million, Speak $78 million, EdSights received an $80 million growth investment, MagicSchool raised $45 million, Noon Academy $41 million, Magma Math $40 million and Yoodli $40 million.

A $20 million round is substantial in education. A $40 million round is already among the bigger financings in the sector. Above $100 million, the list gets very short.

Has AI education funding actually recovered from the edtech crash?

No. AI education is attracting some large rounds right now, but the broader edtech funding market is still much smaller and more selective than it was during the boom.

HolonIQ counted about $1 billion in global EdTech venture funding during the first half of 2026, down 26% from the same period a year earlier. The firm also reported that deal activity remained much stronger in some pockets than others, including East Asia. What has to happen for edtech funding to pick up again is covered under growth drivers in our market report about AI education.

The market had already shown the same basic pattern during 2025: less capital overall, with some unusually large checks still going to companies investors believed had broken away from the pack.

So when MagicSchool raises $45 million, Magma Math raises $40 million or Gizmo raises $22 million, those deals need the right context. They are happening while education investors are being much more selective.

That makes the strongest AI rounds more meaningful. Fewer companies are getting that treatment.

Are investors making fewer but bigger bets in AI education?

In the strongest AI education companies, yes. The market is concentrating meaningful checks in a smaller group of businesses that already have visible adoption or institutional distribution.

The pattern is easy to see in individual rounds. MagicSchool secured $45 million at Series B. Magma Math raised $40 million at Series A. Yoodli raised $40 million at Series B. SchoolAI raised $25 million at Series A, and Gizmo raised $22 million at Series A.

At the same time, our ranking contains a long tail of companies funded with $500,000, $1 million or $2 million.

AI education still produces plenty of small experiments. Once investors see strong usage or institutional adoption, though, the size of the next check can jump fast.

How concentrated is AI education funding?

AI education funding is extremely concentrated: the top 20 companies in our dataset account for about 77% of all the reported capital.

The full dataset contains approximately $3.28 billion. Around $1.19 billion went to the first five companies alone. The top ten account for about $1.90 billion, or 58% of the total.

By company number 20, cumulative funding reaches approximately $2.52 billion. That leaves only about $758 million for the remaining 73 companies.

The bottom of the ranking makes the contrast even clearer. More than 30 companies have raised $15 million or less, while several startups funded by Y Combinator sit around $500,000.

One Preply Series D therefore represents roughly the same amount of capital as hundreds of typical pre-seed checks.

Group	Funding in dataset	Share of total
Top 5	~$1.19B	~36%
Top 10	~$1.90B	~58%
Top 20	~$2.52B	~77%
Remaining 73	~$758M	~23%
All 93 companies	~$3.28B	100%

What types of AI education startups attract the most money?

Language learning, adaptive K-12 learning, mathematics and specialized professional education have attracted the biggest pools of capital so far.

Language learning alone includes Preply at roughly $293 million, Speak at more than $160 million, ELSA at about $48 million, Praktika around $38 million in our dataset and Memrise at about $22 million.

Mathematics is even more crowded. Squirrel AI, DreamBox, Mathpresso/QANDA, Matific, Magma Math, bettermarks, Photomath and Knowledgehook together represent hundreds of millions of dollars. Math, languages and exam prep are problems learners already pay to solve, and we profile who those customers are in our report covering the AI education market.

Medical and professional education has fewer large companies, but AMBOSS changes the scale of the category almost by itself. Yoodli is also pulling AI learning into workplace communication and professional development rather than formal education.

Teacher software is the younger category. MagicSchool, SchoolAI and Brisk Teaching have already attracted meaningful capital, although none yet approaches the cumulative funding of the oldest consumer learning platforms.

The biggest checks tend to follow a clear use case. Language speaking, mathematics, medical knowledge, teacher workload and exam preparation are easier to understand and fund than a vague promise to apply AI to education generally.

Why are investors putting so much money into AI language learning?

AI language learning is attracting unusually large rounds because speaking practice is a natural fit for conversational AI and addresses a problem learners already pay humans to solve.

Speak is the clearest pure-AI example. Its $78 million Series C valued the company at $1 billion and brought total funding to $162 million according to the company's announcement. That valuation had doubled in roughly six months.

Speak also reported that users had spoken more than one billion sentences on the platform during 2024 and that its business product had more than 200 corporate customers.

Preply attacks the same market differently. Human tutors remain central, while AI improves matching, personalization and the learning experience around those tutors.

Praktika takes another route through AI avatars designed specifically for conversation practice.

So there are already three distinct models competing for the same broad need: human tutoring enhanced by AI, direct AI conversation and avatar-based AI tutoring. Investors are funding all three.

Is K-12 AI becoming a big funding market?

Yes. K-12 AI has become one of the busiest parts of education funding, especially around teacher tools, personalized learning and mathematics.

MagicSchool is the biggest recent teacher-focused example. The company raised $45 million in Series B funding and said millions of educators use the product monthly. It also reported partnerships with more than 10,000 schools.

SchoolAI raised a $25 million Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing its announced total to $32 million. OpenAI later reported that SchoolAI had reached one million classrooms across more than 80 countries and had more than 500 education partnerships.

Magma Math adds another $40 million Series A to the category, while Brisk Teaching raised $15 million and smaller companies are emerging around grading, lesson planning and classroom assessment.

These products are competing for different budgets inside the same school system. Some sell teacher productivity, others offer student tutors, while mathematics platforms go much deeper into a single subject.

That variety is one reason K-12 AI is attracting more capital now. The category does not need one universal education platform to become large.

Are teacher AI tools attracting as much money as student AI tutors?

Teacher AI companies are catching up quickly, although consumer learning platforms still dominate cumulative funding.

MagicSchool has raised around $62 million in our dataset. SchoolAI is around $32 million and Brisk Teaching around $22 million. TeachFX, Teachy, Pensive, Chalkie, Edexia and Frizzle add another layer of smaller teacher-focused companies. Whether teacher assistants belong in AI education at all is a line we draw in our AI education market report.

The consumer side remains much larger at the top. Preply, Speak, Brainly, QANDA and several older learning platforms have each accumulated substantially more funding.

The difference partly comes from age, but the business models also scale differently. A consumer product can reach millions of learners quickly. School software has to move through teachers, administrators, districts and procurement systems.

Still, MagicSchool reaching millions of educators and SchoolAI reporting one million classrooms makes this category much harder to dismiss than it was a few years ago. Teacher AI has moved from small productivity tools into serious venture-backed platforms.

Who are the biggest investors in AI education startups?

GSV Ventures, Owl Ventures, Educapital, General Catalyst, Accel, Khosla Ventures and several other funds appear repeatedly across important AI education companies.

GSV Ventures shows up around companies such as Photomath, Gizmo, Kyron Learning and SigIQ. Owl Ventures backed Amira Learning, Brisk Teaching and StudyFetch. Educapital has invested in Preply, Knowunity and Buddy.ai.

General Catalyst appears around Brainly and Lingokids, while Accel has backed Speak and Arivihan. Khosla Ventures appears around Speak, Outsmart Education and Univerbal. Which kinds of funds keep backing learning companies, and what they now avoid, is traced in our report on AI education.

Specialist education investors are still heavily involved, especially at seed and early-growth stages. The bigger recent rounds, however, increasingly attract generalist software and growth investors.

WestCap led Preply's $150 million Series D. Insight Partners led SchoolAI's Series A. WestBridge led Yoodli's Series B. Five Elms led Magma Math's Series A. Andreessen Horowitz led Oboe's Series A.

That crossover is important. Some of today's AI education companies are raising money from investors that would normally look at enterprise software, consumer apps or general AI, rather than treating education as a niche category.

Is AI education funding mostly happening in the United States?

No. The funding leaderboard is unusually international, even though the United States has become particularly strong in the latest generation of school-focused AI startups.

Preply was founded by Ukrainian entrepreneurs. AMBOSS came from Germany. Riiid and Mathpresso/QANDA were founded in South Korea. Squirrel AI and Liulishuo came from China. Brainly originated in Poland, Lingokids in Spain and Knowunity in Germany.

Several of the newer K-12 AI companies are American, including MagicSchool, SchoolAI, Brisk Teaching and Kyron Learning. The United States is also an important market for international companies such as Magma Math.

Asia remains substantial as well. HolonIQ found that East Asian edtech deal volume increased 37% year over year during the first half of 2026 even while global sector funding fell.

The geography has shifted rather than converged. Asian companies still occupy several of the biggest historical funding positions, Europe has produced major consumer-learning businesses, and the United States is producing a large share of the current school-AI wave.

Has Asia lost its early lead in AI education?

Asia still has some of the biggest historically funded AI education companies, but the newest large rounds are spread much more widely across the United States and Europe.

Riiid's $175 million Series D remains enormous by today's standards. Mathpresso/QANDA had raised about $130 million by the time KT invested another $8 million. Squirrel AI and Liulishuo also sit high in the cumulative ranking.

Those companies benefited from an earlier wave of investment in adaptive learning, test preparation and AI-assisted education.

Recent fundraising looks different. Preply raised $150 million, Magma Math $40 million, Yoodli $40 million, Gizmo $22 million, Oboe $16 million and MagicSchool $45 million. These companies span Europe and North America and cover very different types of learning.

At the same time, Asia has hardly gone quiet. HolonIQ's latest figures show East Asian deal activity rising while the global market contracts.

The early concentration has faded, but Asia remains one of the major centers of AI education funding.

Are AI education startups raising bigger rounds earlier?

Some of the strongest AI education startups are now raising $20 million to $40 million at Series A, which is unusually large compared with most companies in our ranking.

Magma Math's $40 million Series A is the clearest example. Praktika raised roughly $35.5 million at Series A, SchoolAI raised $25 million and Gizmo raised $22 million.

Oboe is another useful comparison. The company launched its AI course product and announced a $16 million Series A just three months later, following a $4 million seed round.

These are large financings when we compare them with the rest of the market. More than half the startups in our dataset have raised less than $10 million in total.

But we should not assume every AI education startup can now raise $20 million at Series A. The bottom of the ranking is still packed with $500,000 to $5 million companies.

What changed is the ceiling. Once a startup shows unusually fast adoption, investors can move from a modest seed round to a very large Series A much faster.

How much do acquired startups distort the AI education funding ranking?

Acquired companies represent more than $690 million of the funding in our dataset, so a cumulative ranking does not describe the current competitive market perfectly.

DreamBox Learning alone accounts for $173 million and was acquired by Discovery Education. Knewton accounts for $162 million and its assets were acquired by Wiley. Liulishuo, Embibe, Amira Learning, Kidaptive, Osmo, Photomath, TinyTap, KnowRe, Socratic and MATH 42 are also marked as acquired in the dataset.

Together, those companies represent roughly one fifth of the total capital shown in the ranking. Funding alone says little about the market's size, which we estimate ourselves in our market report about AI education.

That historical capital still belongs in a cumulative fundraising analysis. Investors really did put that money into these companies.

For someone trying to understand which independent AI education startups currently have the most financial firepower, however, acquired businesses should be mentally separated from active companies. Otherwise Knewton can look more important to today's competitive landscape than MagicSchool, SchoolAI or Gizmo simply because it raised much more money years ago.

Is Lingokids actually much better funded than the table suggests?

Yes. Lingokids announced $120 million in new financing after the funding figure captured in our original dataset, although the full amount should not automatically be counted as equity.

The company described the financing as a combination of equity and go-to-market investment, led by Bullhound Capital and General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, with participation from Nextalia Ventures and existing investors.

That structure creates an important distinction for an equity-funding ranking. A $120 million headline financing does not necessarily mean Lingokids sold $120 million of new equity.

We therefore keep the verified historical equity amount separate until the equity portion of that new package can be reconstructed confidently.

Still, the announcement changes how we should think about the company. Lingokids has access to substantially more capital than the older $62 million-plus figure alone suggests, even if part of that capital falls outside the rules of this ranking.

Does raising the most money mean an AI education startup is actually winning?

No. Funding measures how much capital investors have supplied, while product usage, revenue, retention and learning outcomes tell us whether the business itself is working.

Riiid makes the distinction obvious. Its roughly $247 million funding total keeps it near the top, but its largest disclosed round happened years ago.

Gizmo sits much lower at around $26 million, yet it reports more than 13 million learners. MagicSchool has raised around $62 million while reporting millions of monthly educator users. Medly has only around $10 million in our dataset but has already reached more than 400,000 students.

The reverse can happen as well. Knewton raised roughly $162 million before Wiley acquired its assets.

Funding still matters enormously. More capital gives a company time to hire, improve models, subsidize user acquisition and survive slow education sales cycles.

But the ranking answers one precise question: who has raised the most equity capital. It is not a ranking of the best products or the strongest businesses.

What do the latest AI education rounds tell us about where investors are betting now?

Investors are currently putting the biggest new checks behind companies that already own a clear learning workflow rather than generic AI tutoring products.

Preply owns the relationship between language learners and human tutors. Speak concentrates on spoken-language practice. MagicSchool and SchoolAI live inside teachers' daily work. Magma Math goes deep into mathematics instruction. Yoodli specializes in communication roleplay. Oboe generates structured courses. Medly focuses on exam preparation.

That looks quite different from the first rush of products that wrapped a general-purpose chatbot around uploaded notes or homework questions. Chatbot wrappers and tools teachers use daily are different bets, and we study what leaders do differently in our AI education market report.

Distribution is becoming just as important as the AI itself. Gizmo's 13 million learners helped support a $22 million Series A. MagicSchool's millions of educators supported a $45 million Series B. SchoolAI had already built hundreds of education partnerships before reporting that it had reached one million classrooms.

The strongest companies these days usually have something beyond access to a model: users, school relationships, proprietary learning workflows, specialist content or a very specific reason for people to return.

So which AI in Education startups have raised the most funding today?

Preply and AMBOSS sit at the top of our current AI in Education equity-funding ranking, with Riiid and Squirrel AI forming the next tier. The more interesting change is happening further down the table.

The historical leaderboard still contains many companies from the adaptive-learning and pre-generative-AI era. DreamBox, Knewton, Riiid and several Asian education platforms raised huge amounts before today's AI wave began.

The new money is spreading across a younger group. Magma Math raised $40 million at Series A, Gizmo $22 million at Series A, Yoodli $40 million at Series B, Oboe $16 million at Series A and Medly $8 million in its latest round. MagicSchool and SchoolAI have also become well-funded K-12 AI companies in a short period.

At the same time, the wider edtech market remains cautious. First-half sector funding is still down year over year, which makes these large AI rounds more selective than the raw dollar amounts might suggest.

Our final read is simple: cumulative funding still reflects yesterday's winners more than today's momentum. Preply and AMBOSS lead on total capital, while the fastest-moving part of the market now sits among younger AI-native companies that can prove people are actually using their products.