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.
