Chalkie

Chalkie is an AI-powered lesson planning platform for teachers, founded in 2024 by Phillip Daneshyar, Mark Hughes, and Peter Sanderson. Built to address one of the most persistent problems in education — teacher workload — the platform allows educators to generate curriculum-aligned lesson plans, teaching materials, and differentiated activities in minutes. Chalkie operates globally, with its largest markets in the UK, the United States, and Australia, and has grown to support over 500,000 teachers worldwide since launching.

Teacher burnout driven by workload has been a documented crisis across UK and international education systems for years. The 2024 Teacher Wellbeing Index identified lesson planning and resource preparation as the single most time-consuming activity outside classroom contact hours, with teachers spending an average of five or more hours per week on preparation alone. Existing AI tools have generally failed teachers because they require complex prompting, produce generic outputs, or do not align to curriculum frameworks — leaving teachers to do significant editing before materials are usable in the classroom.

Chalkie takes a different approach: teachers enter a topic, select a curriculum framework, and receive complete, classroom-ready materials without the need for extensive editing or AI expertise. The platform includes an AI-enabled slide editor that allows educators to refine outputs to their exact specifications. Crucially, Chalkie frames its value proposition around the output quality and time savings rather than the technology itself — teachers consistently report that the resources are ready to use directly with students, aligned to curriculum standards, and appropriate for mixed-ability classrooms.

The company closed a $4 million funding round from TriplePoint Ventures in March 2026, building on an earlier $1 million pre-seed from the same investor. The capital will be used to expand the team, invest in stronger AI models, grow engineering capacity, and accelerate distribution into school trusts and districts globally as the platform moves from individual teacher sign-ups toward institutional B2B contracts.