imagiLabs, a Stockholm-based education technology startup that make coding more accessible to young girls, has raised about $296K in pre-seed funding to inspire and train the next generation of working women with critical coding skills.
Investors participated in the round include Eros Resmini, Founder and Managing Partner at The Mini Fund; David Baszucki, CEO of gaming giant Roblox; members of Atomico’s Angel Program; and Propel Capital, the investment arm of Stockholm’s leading tech incubator Sting.
Founded in 2018, imagiLabs creates fun wearable gadgets like ‘imagiCharm’, which are customizable through coding to spark the interest of teenage girls, and a mobile app that teaches programming and enables girls to connect over their interest for creative coding. In 2019, the startup launched a kickstarter campaign that allowed the women to take the imagiCharm product from prototype to manufactured product.
imagiLabs launched its products and started to ship in June 2020, and the startup claimed to witness its imagiCharm’s sales increased by 300% between Q3 and Q4 of 2020. Commenting on this, imagiLabs’ co-founder and CEO Dora Palfi said, “In the second half of 2020, we focused on getting as much feedback as possible from the first imagiCharm owners and incorporate their feedback into the improvements we are making, mostly on the imagiLabs app and our learning content.”
The startup said that since its app launch nine months ago, over 10,000 coding projects have been created on the platform.
Commenting on the funding, Eros Resmini, Founder and Managing Partner at The Mini Fund, said he was delighted to support imagiLabs on its mission to bridge the gender divide in tech. “The company has created a vibrant community for young girls who want to learn to code. As the proud father of a daughter, I know that fun and social learning processes can foster passions that last a lifetime.”
According to a report, imagiLabs plans to use the fresh capital to maintain its international growth and to continue to foster an engaged community of young girl coders, who use the apps to learn from each other, share coding tips and designs, and build relationships.
Dora Palfi added, “we will be using it to expand the capabilities of the imagiLabs app and generate more learning content for our community so that we can even better deliver on our promise of making learning to code fun! We plan to reach thousands more teenage girls with the joy of coding in the coming months.”
Needless to mention, imagiLabs was the first Swedish company to be accepted into Apple’s Entrepreneur Camp (Spring 2019 cohort) and was selected for Google for Startups (Female Founders Fall 2019 cohort).
