When Rayen Inostroza moved from Chile to Minnesota eight years ago, she wasn’t planning to launch an AI company. She was focused on teaching.
Today, Inostroza is the founder and CEO of ChatLPO, an AI-powered education platform designed to help teachers create lesson plans, assessments, rubrics, slide decks, and classroom materials aligned to local and national regulations— in seconds instead of hours. The company launched publicly in early 2025 and is already gaining traction in Chile while preparing for broader international expansion.
But the story behind ChatLPO starts long before the company itself.
A Teacher First
Rayen Inostroza began her career as a public school teacher in Chile before moving to the U.S., where she teaches Spanish immersion at Minnetonka High School. Along the way, she built a large online community sharing educational strategies and teaching resources with Spanish-speaking educators.
What started as translating English-language educational research into Spanish evolved into a substantial social media presence reaching more than 300,000 followers across platforms. Teachers from across Latin America began reaching out with questions about classroom tools.
Those conversations revealed a major gap in the market.
“There were AI tools available, but they weren’t built specifically for education,” Instroza said. “And they definitely weren’t designed around the curriculum needs of countries across Latin America.”
That realization sparked the idea for ChatLPO.
Building AI Specifically for Educators
Inostroza partnered with her husband, technologist, and ChatLPO co-founder and CTO Lyndon Carlson, to create a platform purpose-built for teachers. Carlson, whose background spans programming, public sector technology, and enterprise AI systems leadership, led the technical development of the platform with a deliberate focus on responsible AI — ensuring that every design decision prioritized safety, transparency, and alignment with educators’ real needs.
Today, ChatLPO helps teachers generate curriculum-aligned classroom content while dramatically reducing administrative workload. The platform is trained on Chile’s national curriculum standards and built with guardrails designed to keep AI outputs grounded, accurate, and pedagogically sound — reducing the risk of misinformation reaching the classroom.
Teachers can generate lesson plans, unit plans, rubrics and assessments, and slide decks. They can also adapt materials for different learning needs and classroom makeup. Rather than replacing teacher judgment, the platform is designed to augment it, keeping educators in control of what gets taught and how.
“We’re saving teachers between five and nine hours a week,” Inostroza said. “Instead of spending nights and weekends building materials, they can focus more on teaching and their students.”
For Carlson and Inostroza, responsible AI is not a feature. It is a foundation. In an industry where AI tools are often rushed to market, ChatLPO was built from the ground up with governance, curriculum alignment, and educator trust at its core.
The company initially launched as a direct-to-teacher SaaS platform but is increasingly expanding into school-wide and district-level partnerships.
A Bigger Vision for Educational AI
While ChatLPO began as a productivity platform for teachers in Chile, the company’s ambitions are much larger.
Inostroza and Carlson are partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop proprietary institutional AI infrastructure designed specifically for public institutions and governments. Rather than relying entirely on third-party large language models, ChatLPO is building secure, governed, and controlled platforms for customers.
Because education regulations differ, particularly in the U.S., school districts and states will have customized control over the AI policy and execution. The goal is to provide school districts and educational software providers with APIs and AI infrastructure tailored for sensitive use cases with a strong emphasis on transparency, privacy, and data security.
“In the public sector, privacy and trust are critical,” Inostroza said. “Institutions want to know how models are trained and how information is handled. We want to be transparent about that and provide control.”
The company sees global potential for this approach, particularly as educational institutions increasingly look for AI tools that align with regulations, institutional requirements, and student privacy expectations.
Growing as a Founder
Like many early-stage founders, Inostroza built ChatLPO while simultaneously managing a full-time career. For much of the company’s first year, both founders balanced demanding day jobs with nights and weekends dedicated to the startup.
“We were working evenings, weekends, holidays — those were our ChatLPO days,” she said.
That pace helped the company bootstrap its early growth. ChatLPO now has a team of 11 and recurring revenue that has allowed the company to fund operations and continue building the platform. The startup has also begun receiving broader recognition, including being named a top founder in the people of color division of the 2025 MN Cup competition.
Now, with fundraising conversations beginning, Inostroza is preparing for ChatLPO’s next phase of growth.
The Role of MESA Mentoring
As ChatLPO grew, Inostroza and Carlson sought guidance from experienced founders and operators who understood the realities of scaling a technology company. They found that support through MESA.
Since 2025, the founders have worked with MESA mentors Chad Eckes and Jeff Eckerle, who have helped them navigate challenges ranging from SaaS business strategy to leadership development and fundraising preparation.
One early area of focus was reducing seasonal customer churn among individual teacher subscribers. Through conversations with their mentors, ChatLPO shifted more aggressively toward school and institutional partnerships, creating more stable annual contracts and long-term growth opportunities.
MESA mentor Chad Eckes shared, “Rayen and Lyndon always come to mentoring meetings with important questions and open minds. Jeff and I find their enthusiasm for solving teachers’ problems infectious, and we all leave each meeting with more energy than we started with.”
“Our mentors always ask the right questions,” Inostroza said. “They’re not giving us the answers. They help us think differently and come to better solutions as a team.”
For Inostroza, the biggest value of mentoring comes from learning directly from people who have already experienced the challenges of building and scaling startups.
“Having someone who has already gone through this process and can share their perspective is incredibly valuable,” she said.
Building Opportunity Through Relationships
Throughout her journey, from a student in Chile learning English for the first time to becoming an AI founder, Inostroza says one lesson has consistently shaped her path: relationships matter.
She recalls competing for a scholarship opportunity that brought her to Minnesota as a teaching intern years ago. Despite not having the strongest academic profile among applicants, she was selected because of her personality, enthusiasm, and ability to connect with others.
“That changed how I looked at life,” she said. “I realized people care about who you are, not just numbers and results.”
That perspective continues to shape how she leads ChatLPO today — combining educational expertise, technical innovation, and a deeply human approach to building relationships. As ChatLPO continues expanding beyond Chile and into broader global markets, that combination may prove to be one of the company’s greatest advantages.
