Ignat Bobrovich, CEO and Founder, Valvur.AI

The difference starts with the approach. Our competition isn’t limited to security tools; it includes parental control apps and consent management tools too, and what we see broadly is that most solutions are built around control and limitation. The European Union just published the Kids Act, its new framework for protecting children online, which is exactly our field, and it’s still built largely around that same instinct to restrict.

We believe proactive protection matters, but our core idea is that we need to build trust between stakeholders, and right now our focus is on kids and families. We’re building trust between kid and parent when it comes to online life: gaming, audiovisual media, and beyond. At the same time, we do have protection tools, using AI to protect kids from grooming, cyberbullying, and other attacks happening on platforms like Discord and inside games. Where feasible, that AI runs on the device itself, with the data depersonalized, so unless something is genuinely serious, the parent doesn’t see the details of every incident. Privacy has to be maintained for trust to work.

One of the patterns we see most often on gaming platforms is grooming, and sometimes recruitment into far more serious harm. It typically starts small: someone approaches a child in a game and offers something, often in-game currency, in exchange for a favor, building familiarity over time. If that escalates into a request for photos and the child complies, predators can use that material to blackmail the child into sending more, under threat of exposing what they already have. For a young teenager, that threat of exposure can feel like social death, and it can push them to keep complying long after they want to stop. We’ve also seen cases where children are asked to access a parent’s banking app directly, sometimes for substantial sums.

It can go further still. We’re currently in discussions with a partner in Azerbaijan, who told us that just last week there was a suicide linked to exactly this kind of pressure building up inside Roblox. And the Financial Times reported this year on a case in the Netherlands where a minor was approached in a game, befriended, offered virtual currency, and gradually drawn into placing surveillance devices near a sensitive military site on behalf of a third country. These are the extremes, but they show how far this can escalate.

What we keep coming back to is that no amount of parental control software changes the underlying dynamic if the child feels they have to hide what’s happening. If a parent or a government tries to simply forbid something, kids find a VPN or a second device, and that opens what I’d call a Pandora’s box: now there are two reasons not to tell anyone if something goes wrong, not one. That’s what makes the very last moment, the police, a suicide attempt, a family’s savings gone, come so late. We’re a deep-tech company, but our real point of difference is that we start from trust, not restriction: trust between kid and parent, and between kid and the other people around them.

Cyberbullying. There’s a statistic that over 70 percent of kids have experienced at least one form of cyber threat, and the instinct is still to try to forbid rather than address it. Look at Australia, the first country to introduce an age ban on social media. I think it’s good that they’re doing something, but you can find the statistics showing VPN downloads there skyrocketed the moment the ban took effect. So does the ban actually help? Not really.

Cyberbullying itself can do real damage to mental health. There was research done in New Zealand a few years ago that put a cost on severe cyberbullying: a single serious case was estimated to cost the country somewhere north of 50,000 New Zealand dollars once you account for the downstream effects. In the worst cases that impact leads to suicide, but even short of that, the depression and loss of interest it causes has a real cost to the person and to society. On top of that, roughly 30 percent of parents don’t feel equipped to respond when a cyber threat happens, because they simply don’t understand what’s happening online. From cyberbullying to grooming to account takeover, there’s a long list of problems, but I’d say the ones that damage mental health over the long term are the ones we should be most worried about.

Yes, it’s live for kids and parents. We started in Estonia, working with the Estonian Cyber Security Competence Centre, and built it for that market first. We’ve now launched an English-language version publicly, though we still treat that mainly as a way to explain what we do, because working with local partners matters so much to us. Kids communicate in their own language long before they’re comfortable in English, so full adaptation with local government institutions and partners is where the real impact happens.

There’s a mobile app for kids, built around gamified cybersecurity and cyber-resilience training, along with a trust-building layer that encourages kids not to hide the fact that they’re gaming, and helps parents connect giving money for games to the child being open about their online life. And there’s a web app for parents that helps build their own digital parenting skills around their kids’ online world.

The sheer scale of the problem. My background is more than ten years in esports, mostly building competitions and the infrastructure around them. At some point, while working on a book, I started to see that beyond running a good competition, there was a much bigger problem underneath it. When I saw statistics showing that half of kids keep up with friends through gaming, and more than 40 percent make new friends that way, I understood how big this really was.

There’s also a personal reason I wanted to build this. I was bullied at school as a kid, before the internet really existed. Looking back, I realize how lucky I was, because when the school day ended, I went home, closed the door, and had a safe space. Today there is no safe space like that. You’re always reachable, always on a device. That lack of anywhere to hide from cyberbullying and online predators is something I don’t think we can overstate the importance of.

That’s a long list, but let me pick one. I think it’s important to understand that we can’t control everything or force every situation to go the way we want, and that it’s important to step back and see the broader picture. We’re often told that focus is important, and it is, when you’re working on a small task with a clear beginning and end. But if you stay narrowly focused all the time, you’ll miss things, and you’ll likely take a lot of wrong actions or miss important ones simply because your view was too narrow. You won’t always be able to see the whole picture, but it’s better to see more of it than you can when you’re fully zoomed in.