Teachers deserve better than Sunday night paperwork
Teacher's Buddy exists because the best teachers we know were burning out on formatting, not teaching. We built the tool we wish had existed when we were in the classroom.
Priya spent years working on curriculum software at a K-12 ed-tech company, watching teachers use their product for maybe 30 minutes per week, but spending four hours every Sunday filling in lesson plan templates.
The core problem was not that teachers lacked tools. It was that all the tools generated empty templates and then left the teacher to stare at a blinking cursor. The hardest part, drafting the actual content, was still entirely on the teacher.
In 2023, Priya and Marcus built the first version of Teacher's Buddy as a side project to answer one question: what if the tool filled in the first draft? Within six weeks, they had early-access teachers telling them it was saving three to five hours a week. Teacher's Buddy, Inc. was incorporated that fall.
Simone joined soon after, bringing direct classroom experience from her years as a middle-school science teacher before she moved into ed-tech product work. Her first week on the team, she rewrote the entire sub plan generator from scratch based on what she knew a substitute teacher actually needs to walk into a classroom cold.
Educators and builders
We are a small team with deep roots in classrooms, ed-tech, and systems engineering. Everyone here has spent time in or around K-12 education.
Priya Venkatesan
Led ed-tech product work at a K-12 curriculum software company before founding Teacher's Buddy. Her background spans instructional design, product strategy, and deep familiarity with the tools teachers actually use and ignore. She started this company because she could not stop thinking about the Sunday-evening problem.
Marcus Okafor
Built distributed document generation pipelines and NLP-driven content tools across two startups before joining Priya to build Teacher's Buddy. He wrote the core generation engine and owns the infrastructure. His older sister teaches fifth grade in Lagos, which is why he cares more about this problem than any other he has worked on.
Simone Archer
Former middle-school science teacher who moved into ed-tech product after four years in the classroom. She brings a researcher's instinct for watching how teachers actually work versus how they are supposed to work. She drives everything from template design to the onboarding flow, with an insistence that every feature earns its place.
What we believe about teachers and technology
Teachers come first
Every feature we add is tested against one question: does a classroom teacher save meaningful time? If not, we do not ship it. We work in service of the people in front of kids every day, not in service of administrative software checklists.
Student privacy is not negotiable
We do not ask for student names, IDs, or personal data. Our system works with subject areas and grade levels, not student records. Your inputs are not used to train AI models. We built this constraint into the architecture, not into a privacy policy footnote.
Opinions, not options
We are not a blank-slate prompt box where you have to tell the AI exactly what to do. We have opinions about what a good lesson plan looks like, what a useful sub plan includes, and what a professional parent email sounds like. You can adjust. We give you a strong starting point.
Join the teachers saving hours every week
Start free. No credit card, no setup, no commitment. If Teacher's Buddy does not save you real time, cancel and pay nothing.