Entrepreneur of 2025: Adeel Khan, founder and CEO, MagicSchool AI, Denver

Adeel Khan, 37, worked as a teacher and assistant principal before founding DSST: Conservatory Green High School in Denver in 2017. He left the school in 2021 and coached principals for about a year, but it wasn’t a great fit.

“I really missed the building process,” says Khan. “I wanted to chase a really big, ambitious dream, and being behind the scenes turned out not to be necessarily the role for me.”

Khan took a break, traveled the world and returned to Denver in November 2022 just in time for the ChatGPT launch. “Generative AI was dominating the headlines, and people were really inspired by new technology,” he says. “It struck me that there was so much utility here for educators.”

He started showing teachers how to use ChatGPT in the classroom and encountered a problem that he founded MagicSchool AI to solve: “They didn’t have the time on their hands to learn how to use this technology,” says Khan. “Teachers already have an abundance of responsibilities now, and the list just continues to grow.”

That catalyzed Khan’s quest to build a teacher-specific AI platform that didn’t add yet another item to the list. MagicSchool built the first iteration of the platform with “essentially a team of volunteers,” says Khan. The company’s first employee, Ilana Bye, was eight months pregnant and “working for free.”

Upon its launch in May 2023, Khan reached out to teachers he knew from his career in education and got them to try the platform. “We got our first angel investment check of around $25,000, and that was enough to pay Ilana and pay folks who were working for me for free,” he says. “And we were off to the races.”

That’s a bit of an understatement. In two short years, the company raised $65 million in venture capital, the team expanded to 120 employees, and the user base skyrocketed to 5.5 million educators, easily eclipsing the 3.5 million K-12 teachers in the U.S. alone. Many users use the free version, and more than 13,000 schools and districts are paying customers.

“MagicSchool is now the fastest growing technology product for schools ever and used by every single school and district in the nation by our count,” says Khan. “We have a teacher in every single school and district in the nation, and now 160 countries around the world.”

“It seems like we continue to kind of catch a wave of momentum and positive opportunities for our mission to fight teacher burnout and create sustainable schools where teachers can automate some of their tasks and really focus on the needs of the students.”

Khan highlights the platform’s writing feedback tool. After implementing the tool in 2023, Aurora Public Schools saw a 28 percent year-over-year improvement in students’ grade-level literacy. “Right in the moment when it’s most valuable, the student gets the feedback and then they can improve their essay,” says Khan. “I’ve been in schools my whole life. I can’t think of a tool that has been able to move results that dramatically.”

He speaks from experience: “When I was an English teacher, it would have been nearly impossible for me to give formative feedback to 130 kids. That’s how many kids I taught over five periods, and now every single kid can get meaningful formative feedback on their writing to improve it. That’s game changing.”

Bye, MagicSchool’s first employee is now a MagicSchool engineer, and she knew Khan from her career in education before she moved into coding in 2022. While technical acumen has been integral to MagicSchool’s growth, Bye says that educational experience has been similarly critical.

“We have more hustle, more heart and more commitment to this population and serving them well than we could imagine anyone else does, so we bet on us,” she explains. And we’ve been more successful than our wildest dreams.”

Bye says Khan has led the way by bridging the gap between the two fields. “I think he’s a visionary,” she notes. “He’s not technical, but he really seeks to understand. He’s curious, and he has great intuition and vision.”

Khan says the company should hit the 200-employee mark by the end of the year, and fundraising is not a current priority. “We ended last year cash-flow positive, so we have quite a lot of dollars in the bank,” he explains. “We have real revenue, so we’re pretty financially stable and healthy right now.”

MagicSchool is instead focused on developing the next generation of the platform for both teachers and students. “That’s going to get much deeper into the workflow of the educator,” Khan explains. “It helps the student learn and learns about how they learn over time.”

Khan has likewise learned a lot during his two-year entrepreneurial journey. “It’s important to know the kind of founder that you have to be for each stage of the company,” he says. “One of the most challenging things about it is that the job evolves, and either you keep up with the evolution or find yourself in a lot of pain.”

The entire world might just learn a similar lesson when it comes to AI, adds Khan. “It’ll be a superpower to be able to use AI and use it well and use it responsibly, which are three different things. Using it’s not enough. Using it thoughtfully and responsibly is a whole new skill that we’re all learning right now.”

And that is central to MagicSchool as it reinvents education for the TikTok generation. “We fundamentally believe that generative AI is a transformational moment for education,” says Khan. “This technology stands to benefit this industry more than any other.”

www.magicschool.ai