Chalkie Raises £3M to Give 500,000 Teachers Back Five Hours a Week With AI Lesson Planning

March 19, 2026

Chalkie, the AI-powered lesson planning platform, raised £3 million ($4 million) from TriplePoint Ventures in March 2026. The funding will allow the founding team — currently six people — to expand headcount, invest in stronger AI models, grow the engineering team, and scale distribution into school trusts and districts globally. Chalkie was founded in 2024 by Phillip Daneshyar, Mark Hughes, and Peter Sanderson.

Teacher workload has been one of the most persistent and under-addressed problems in UK education for decades. The 2024 Teacher Wellbeing Index found that workload remains the primary driver of teacher burnout and attrition, with planning and resource preparation consistently ranked as the most time-consuming activity outside of classroom contact hours. For most teachers, a single lesson requires sourcing materials, aligning them to curriculum standards, differentiating content for students with different ability levels, and assembling them into a structured plan — a process that can take one to three hours per lesson and often spills into evenings and weekends. For a full-time secondary school teacher delivering five or more lessons a day, this is an unsustainable burden.

Chalkie addresses this directly. A teacher enters a topic, selects their curriculum (the platform supports any national curriculum), and the AI generates a complete, structured lesson plan in seconds — including professionally designed teaching materials and differentiated activity sheets tailored to students of varying abilities. The platform does not replace teacher judgement; it eliminates the mechanical production work that surrounds it, allowing educators to spend their time on the parts of teaching that require human expertise: relationships, explanation, questioning, and feedback. The company reports that teachers using Chalkie save an average of five hours per week, with 90% strongly agreeing it contributes to their long-term professional wellbeing. Daneshyar has described the long-term ambition as building the “Canva for education” — a platform that gives teachers instant access to high-quality, current, curriculum-aligned visual content rather than waiting years for textbooks to catch up to the world.

The founding team brings directly relevant experience. Daneshyar is a Y Combinator alumnus (W21) whose previous company Kanda brokered over $100 million in loans for UK home improvement businesses, and who appeared on Dragon’s Den. Hughes co-founded Tutorful, one of the UK’s largest tutoring marketplaces, which employed over 80 people and raised more than $10 million before its closure — giving him deep knowledge of what teachers need and how education products reach adoption. Sanderson, formerly Head of Design at Tutorful, brings the product design discipline that translates teacher feedback into a platform that is genuinely simple to use under classroom conditions. TriplePoint Ventures, the London-based VC that also backed Marshmallow, led both the £1 million pre-seed in October 2025 and this £3 million follow-on, representing conviction in the team’s ability to scale.

The commercial trajectory underpins that conviction. By the time of the March 2026 raise, Chalkie had reached over 500,000 teachers and more than 10 million students globally — remarkable scale for a company founded roughly 18 months earlier. TriplePoint investor Sam Stone described the growth and retention metrics as among the best he had seen in any company, reflecting a product that teachers genuinely return to and rely on rather than a viral novelty that fades after first use. The platform offers a permanently free tier alongside Pro and Max plans, giving it a wide top-of-funnel while monetising the most engaged users — a classic product-led growth architecture suited to a global rollout.

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