Phillip Daneshyar

Phillip Daneshyar is a serial entrepreneur of Iranian heritage based in the United Kingdom. He studied at the University of York before embarking on a career defined by building and scaling technology ventures from early stages to significant commercial traction. His entrepreneurial trajectory is characterised by rapid iteration, consumer-facing product thinking, and a willingness to operate across different sectors in search of large, underserved problems.

Before co-founding Chalkie, Daneshyar built and exited multiple ventures. His most prominent prior company, Kanda, was a fintech platform for UK home improvement businesses that brokered more than $100 million in loans and helped over 10,000 tradespeople access financing to grow their companies. Kanda was backed by Y Combinator (W21 cohort), giving Daneshyar hands-on experience in the accelerator's build-first, growth-obsessed culture that has since shaped his operating philosophy. He also appeared on the BBC's Dragon's Den, gaining national exposure for his ventures, though he has noted that investor rejection reinforced his conviction in the importance of building products people actually want over optimising for fundraising optics.

In 2024, Daneshyar co-founded Chalkie alongside Mark Hughes (formerly of Tutorful) and Peter Sanderson (Head of Design at Tutorful). The founding team combined Daneshyar's commercial and go-to-market experience with Hughes's deep knowledge of the UK education sector and Sanderson's product design expertise. Chalkie was built around a single insight: that AI had finally become capable enough to generate curriculum-aligned teaching materials of sufficient quality for direct classroom use, eliminating the editing burden that had made previous AI tools impractical for teachers.

Under Daneshyar's leadership as CEO, Chalkie has grown to serve more than 500,000 teachers globally across its largest markets in the UK, the US, and Australia. The company raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from TriplePoint Ventures in 2025 and followed with a $4 million round from the same investor in March 2026, which Daneshyar intends to use to expand headcount, deepen AI model investment, and scale distribution into school trusts and districts globally.