Melbourne based edtech startup Teacher’s Buddy has raised $1.85 million in Seed funding to address teacher burnout with artificial intelligence. The company is building an AI powered workspace that cuts administrative work, supports professional development, and helps educators focus more on students. Its founding team is positioning the platform as both a wellbeing tool for teachers and a lever to lift student outcomes at scale.
Founders And Vision
Teacher’s Buddy was founded in 2024 by Matt Abraham and serial edtech entrepreneur Ben Sze. Sze previously co founded Edrolo, a curriculum and resources platform that became one of Australia’s standout edtech growth stories and secured a $40 million Series B round in 2022. With Teacher’s Buddy, he and Abraham are turning their attention to the growing global problem of teacher overload and attrition.
Tackling Teacher Burnout With AI
The startup is built around the reality that many teachers routinely work more than 50 hours a week. A significant portion of that time is consumed by lesson planning, grading, report writing, and meeting preparation, rather than direct engagement with students. Teacher’s Buddy uses AI to automate and streamline these tasks, giving teachers back time and reducing the cognitive load that contributes to burnout.
Early Traction Across Classrooms
Despite being a young company, Teacher’s Buddy has already attracted more than 12,000 teachers across 130 countries to its platform. The product has also secured 15 school level partnerships in Australia and New Zealand, signaling institutional confidence in the model. Internal data suggests the software can save the equivalent of around 12 working days per term across planning, marking, reporting, and meetings, which translates to roughly a 20 percent productivity gain.
Details Of The Seed Round
The $1.85 million Seed round is led by impact focused investor Giant Leap. Additional participation comes from Flying Fox Ventures, Co Ventures, Exhort Ventures, Saniel Ventures, and Soul Capital, reflecting a mix of early stage and mission aligned backers. The new capital gives Teacher’s Buddy the runway to expand its product capabilities while accelerating go to market efforts.
Investor Perspectives On Impact
Giant Leap partner Adam Milgrom describes teacher capacity as one of the most overlooked levers for raising student performance. He argues that when educators are buried in paperwork and administrative tasks, the quality of instruction and relationships in the classroom inevitably suffers. By using AI to shrink that workload, Milgrom believes Teacher’s Buddy can simultaneously improve teacher wellbeing and student learning outcomes.
Reimagining Education With AI
Co Ventures investor Maxine Minter characterizes education as a sector that everyone recognizes as strained yet difficult to transform with traditional software tools. She points to recent advances in AI as a chance to challenge long held assumptions about what support for teachers can look like in practice. For Minter, the combination of a technological inflection point and founders who have already built successfully in education makes the company’s timing and team particularly compelling.
Growth Plans And Market Focus
Teacher’s Buddy plans to use the Seed funding to grow its engineering and product teams and to accelerate its roadmap. The company is prioritizing expansion in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, where teacher shortages and workload pressures are well documented. Over the next 12 months, Abraham and Sze are targeting 30,000 teachers and 200 school partners, arguing that current adoption already validates the urgency and breadth of the problem they are tackling.
Teacher’s Buddy is positioning itself as an AI enabled ally for teachers who are stretched by rising expectations and mounting administrative demands. With fresh Seed capital, early international traction, and backing from impact and technology investors, the startup aims to prove that reducing teacher workload can be directly linked to better student outcomes. As education systems worldwide search for practical responses to burnout and attrition, the company is betting that an all in one AI workspace can become part of the long term solution.