The Pitch Deck Edtech Startup Kira Learning Used to Raise $15 Million

In 2021, Andrea Pasinetti was studying machine learning at Stanford University when he reconnected with the professor who would eventually become his business partner.

That professor, Andrew Ng, a computer science adjunct at Stanford University and the cofounder of the edtech giant Coursera, hit it off with Pasinetti several years ago after a mutual friend introduced them. Pasinetti reconnected with Ng while he was getting his masters degree at Stanford, and the two started talking about collaborating on a business idea for a way to help teachers build a computer science curriculum for K-12 schools. The idea was to help students become familiar with computer science before they get into college.

At the time, the two were seeing more and more states begin to require computer science courses in high school as part of graduation requirements, but there was a problem. Teachers in these schools had never taught computer science before, and many were new to learning coding skills themselves.

"We found that by 2026, every student in the US will have taken a year of computer science, whether it was in middle school, high school, as a requirement or an elective," said Pasinetti. "It's a big market opportunity."

After a few days of doing additional research into the market opportunity, Pasinetti decided to start building what would eventually become Kira Learning, a teaching platform and video-based curriculum for teachers and students in K-12 schools. He and Ng brought on Jagriti Agrawal, a former AI developer and product manager at NASA, as a cofounder to lead their AI development team.

This year, Kira Learning's existing seed investor, NEA, decided to preempt the company's Series A round, giving the team a term sheet for what ended up being their $15 million round. Ng also helped by securing additional funding from the AI Fund, a speciality venture fund where Ng sits as the general managing partner. NEA and the AI Fund also led Kira Learning's seed and pre-seed rounds, and the startup has raised $22.5 million to date, a spokesperson for the company confirmed.

On Kira Learning's platform, teachers can instruct online courses with a pre-set curriculum for each class, which they can modify and customize as they see fit. Kira Learning also offers AI-powered grading software that immediately checks students' assignments for coding errors and can either correct or offer suggestions on how students could solve the problems themselves.

"For a new computer science teacher, grading is a challenge when you're looking at a coding assignment — you don't necessarily know where all the issues might be," said Pasinetti.

This AI-powered grader was a selling point in the startup's recent deal with the Tennessee STEM Innovation Network, which helps get tools for STEM education into Tennessee public schools. The partnership made perfect sense for Kira Learning, since Tennessee was one of the newest states requiring that all students take a computer science course as a graduation requirement. The partnership will make Kira Learning's computer science courses available to all public middle and high schools in the state, at no cost to schools, Pasinetti said.

The team is in "active discussions" with other state school systems, and anticipates having programs in about 20 states by this fall, Pasinetti also told Insider.

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