Deena Shakir, an investor at Lux Capital, struggled to explain to her three young kids what exactly her job was. She first tried buying a Chia Pet, where kids plant chia seeds on a figurine “to show them how seeds can grow into something amazing.”
Shakir, who’s invested in health tech companies like fertility startup Alife Health and women’s health company Maven Clinic, particularly loved that the figurine was a unicorn. “They didn’t get the joke, but I thought it was hilarious,” she said.
In 2020, in the midst of quarantine-induced boredom, she decided she needed to create something that explained the process of founding a startup but would also be engaging for children. Shakir settled on a picture book and got to work. On Tuesday, Shakir’s first book, “Leena Mo, CEO,” comes out.
In the book, Leena Mo builds a robot to plow snow. Her neighbors all beg her to build dozens more and sell them one, a feat that seems impossible until a neighbor offers to invest. Leena Mo recruits a team, advertises the robot on local news, and, you guessed it, becomes a CEO.
To get “Leena Mo, CEO” published, Shakir emailed hundreds of agents. “And the vast majority of them completely ignored me,” she said. Eventually she landed an agent and then scored a deal from Simon & Schuster in the spring of 2022.
Now that Leena Mo is finally out in the world, Shakir is tinkering with expanding Mo’s universe, potentially with a follow-up picture book or a graphic novel. “This is the story of the entrepreneur, but I’d love to be able to tell a story of the investor,” she said.
But, above all, she hopes that children read about Leena Mo, who is American Iraqi and Muslim, and see a woman excelling in business. “It’s totally normal for someone to be a girl building a robot and an entrepreneur, who is also Iraqi and also Muslim,” she said. “We exist in multitudes.”
Pok Pok, a kids’ app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its app and new STEM-based activities to families with both iOS and Android devices, thanks to its latest funding.
The app, Pok Pok Playroom, today offers 17 play experiences that are more akin to “digital toys” than games, as they allow kids to explore with creative play. There are “toys” that respond to touches, drawing tools, those for interacting with shapes, dress-up toys, dinosaur toys and much more.
Originally incubated inside Snowman, the studio behind award-winning iOS games like Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Skate City and others, the idea for Pok Pok emerged from the company’s culture of tinkering.
Snowman employees Mathijs Demaeght and Esther Huybreghts, now Pok Pok VP of design and chief creative officer, respectively, were looking for an app to entertain their young son James when he was a toddler. However, the co-founders didn’t find many options they liked. They wanted something playful, but not too technical and not gamified. After prototyping a product, they showed it to Snowman co-founder and creative director Ryan Cash, who saw the potential. Ryan’s sister, Melissa Cash, whose background was in developing products for babies and toddlers at Disney, joined the team and is now CEO of the Pok Pok spinout.
In the years since its May 2021 debut, Pok Pok has added new learning experiences to its app, raised a $3 million seed round and reached six figures in terms of monthly recurring revenue. Over the past year, the business has grown by 5x and the subscriber base by 9x, though the startup isn’t yet ready to share hard numbers. The app itself has over a million downloads.
Image Credits: Pok Pok
The startup’s growth caught investors’ attention, leading to a $6 million Series A. The round was led by Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn, who has also backed other subscription businesses like Oura, Calm, Clue and Blinkist. Also participating in the round were Konvoy Ventures, Metalab Ventures, Banana Capital and other angel investors, including Instacart’s Brandon Leonardo.
Though pleased to have raised an oversubscribed round, the team realized they didn’t have any women on their cap table, which made them uneasy, given that the women-led company builds products for families.
“That just didn’t sit right,” said CEO Melissa Cash. “So we decided to make some allocation changes. We set aside some cash from the round. We did a first close because we didn’t want to hold up everything, but we took cash out and did a second close, which actually took us longer to raise than the first close because it was very tough to find female investors who participate at Series A and beyond.”
The team found that a lot of the women-led VCs tended to be pre-seed or seed or those who were involved in funds, but weren’t the decision-makers and check writers.
“That nuance was pretty important to us. And then we would find a lot of wonderful angel investors, but they didn’t have the capital or the wealth, frankly, to be able to invest in a Series A because, obviously, there’s a minimum check size. So it was a really eye-opening experience,” she said. “We thought if there’s any company that can get female backing, it’s Pok Pok.”
The second close of the round took them longer than the first due to these challenges and includes investors like Michelle Kennedy from Peanut.
Another one of the new investors ended up being Pok Pok’s fractional CFO, Julie McGill, who’s also an LP in several bigger venture funds. Like Pok Pok’s team, she was frustrated by the trouble the company was having to find women to add to the cap table. McGill ended up starting a brand-new fund, Julie Change Fund, just to invest in Pok Pok. The fund will now focus on bringing in wealthy individual women investing at the Series A stage and beyond.
“Pok Pok is the catalyst for starting a fund I have been thinking about for years; this fund is my commitment to breaking barriers women face in accessing, driving and accumulating capital,” McGill said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Pok Pok, a company that excels at driving capital efficient growth, led by two amazing women.”
With the additional funds, Pok Pok is going to expand its offerings to include more STEM-based activities, in response to parents’ requests for more traditional learning experiences in the app alongside the more playful ones. The new activities will still be targeted to the preschool crowd, though Pok Pok is aware that even younger and older users continue to use its app and designs accordingly.
The company will also be able to address demand for Android later this fall. Many families have Android tablets for their kids because of the more accessible price points, Cash said.
“We want to make sure Pok Pok can be accessible to everybody. And we’ve had this waitlist growing for quite some time, so we have thousands of users … just waiting for it,” she said.
Meta announced on Wednesday that users aged 10 to 12 will soon be able to interact with others in VR if they have their parents’ approval to do so. Up until now, children were not able to chat or interact with other users on Quest.
In an upcoming update, Meta is adding the ability for parents to individually add approved contacts that their child can chat with or call, and send or accept invites to join them in parent-approved VR experiences.
By opening up its VR experiences to children, Meta is hoping younger users will familiarize themselves with the technology, which could make them more likely to use it as they age. It could also help Meta take on other companies like Roblox and Microsoft’s Minecraft, both of which are popular among young users.
Meta explains that users will only become approved contacts once a parent adds them. Parents can manage approved contacts by adding them to their child’s Following and Followers list. Children can request a follower to become an approved contact, and parents have the option to delete an approved contact at any time.
Last year, Meta lowered the recommended age for using its Quest headset from 13 to 10. The company then launched parent-managed accounts that give users between the ages of 10 and 12 access to age-appropriate VR experiences on Quest.
VR is a relatively newer technology and risks around its use are still somewhat unknown, which has promoted child safety concerns from parents, rights groups, and researchers.
Meta’s decision to bring social features to children’s accounts on Quest comes as Congress is putting increased pressure on social media companies like Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat to protect children on their platforms.
Pok Pok, a kids’ app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its app and new STEM-based activities to families with both iOS and Android devices, thanks to its latest funding.
The app, Pok Pok Playroom, today offers 17 play experiences that are more akin to “digital toys” than games, as they allow kids to explore with creative play. There are “toys” that respond to touches, drawing tools, those for interacting with shapes, dress-up toys, dinosaur toys and much more.
Originally incubated inside Snowman, the studio behind award-winning iOS games like Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Skate City and others, the idea for Pok Pok emerged from the company’s culture of tinkering.
Snowman employees Mathijs Demaeght and Esther Huybreghts, now Pok Pok VP of design and chief creative officer, respectively, were looking for an app to entertain their young son James when he was a toddler. However, the co-founders didn’t find many options they liked. They wanted something playful, but not too technical and not gamified. After prototyping a product, they showed it to Snowman co-founder and creative director Ryan Cash, who saw the potential. Ryan’s sister, Melissa Cash, whose background was in developing products for babies and toddlers at Disney, joined the team and is now CEO of the Pok Pok spinout.
In the years since its May 2021 debut, Pok Pok has added new learning experiences to its app, raised a $3 million seed round and reached six figures in terms of monthly recurring revenue. Over the past year, the business has grown by 5x and the subscriber base by 9x, though the startup isn’t yet ready to share hard numbers. The app itself has over a million downloads.
Image Credits: Pok Pok
The startup’s growth caught investors’ attention, leading to a $6 million Series A. The round was led by Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn, who has also backed other subscription businesses like Oura, Calm, Clue and Blinkist. Also participating in the round were Konvoy Ventures, Metalab Ventures, Banana Capital and other angel investors, including Instacart’s Brandon Leonardo.
Though pleased to have raised an oversubscribed round, the team realized they didn’t have any women on their cap table, which made them uneasy, given that the women-led company builds products for families.
“That just didn’t sit right,” said CEO Melissa Cash. “So we decided to make some allocation changes. We set aside some cash from the round. We did a first close because we didn’t want to hold up everything, but we took cash out and did a second close, which actually took us longer to raise than the first close because it was very tough to find female investors who participate at Series A and beyond.”
The team found that a lot of the women-led VCs tended to be pre-seed or seed or those who were involved in funds, but weren’t the decision-makers and check writers.
“That nuance was pretty important to us. And then we would find a lot of wonderful angel investors, but they didn’t have the capital or the wealth, frankly, to be able to invest in a Series A because, obviously, there’s a minimum check size. So it was a really eye-opening experience,” she said. “We thought if there’s any company that can get female backing, it’s Pok Pok.”
The second close of the round took them longer than the first due to these challenges and includes investors like Michelle Kennedy from Peanut.
Another one of the new investors ended up being Pok Pok’s fractional CFO, Julie McGill, who’s also an LP in several bigger venture funds. Like Pok Pok’s team, she was frustrated by the trouble the company was having to find women to add to the cap table. McGill ended up starting a brand-new fund, Julie Change Fund, just to invest in Pok Pok. The fund will now focus on bringing in wealthy individual women investing at the Series A stage and beyond.
“Pok Pok is the catalyst for starting a fund I have been thinking about for years; this fund is my commitment to breaking barriers women face in accessing, driving and accumulating capital,” McGill said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Pok Pok, a company that excels at driving capital efficient growth, led by two amazing women.”
With the additional funds, Pok Pok is going to expand its offerings to include more STEM-based activities, in response to parents’ requests for more traditional learning experiences in the app alongside the more playful ones. The new activities will still be targeted to the preschool crowd, though Pok Pok is aware that even younger and older users continue to use its app and designs accordingly.
The company will also be able to address demand for Android later this fall. Many families have Android tablets for their kids because of the more accessible price points, Cash said.
“We want to make sure Pok Pok can be accessible to everybody. And we’ve had this waitlist growing for quite some time, so we have thousands of users … just waiting for it,” she said.
Meta announced on Wednesday that users aged 10 to 12 will soon be able to interact with others in VR if they have their parents’ approval to do so. Up until now, children were not able to chat or interact with other users on Quest.
In an upcoming update, Meta is adding the ability for parents to individually add approved contacts that their child can chat with or call, and send or accept invites to join them in parent-approved VR experiences.
By opening up its VR experiences to children, Meta is hoping younger users will familiarize themselves with the technology, which could make them more likely to use it as they age. It could also help Meta take on other companies like Roblox and Microsoft’s Minecraft, both of which are popular among young users.
Meta explains that users will only become approved contacts once a parent adds them. Parents can manage approved contacts by adding them to their child’s Following and Followers list. Children can request a follower to become an approved contact, and parents have the option to delete an approved contact at any time.
Last year, Meta lowered the recommended age for using its Quest headset from 13 to 10. The company then launched parent-managed accounts that give users between the ages of 10 and 12 access to age-appropriate VR experiences on Quest.
VR is a relatively newer technology and risks around its use are still somewhat unknown, which has promoted child safety concerns from parents, rights groups, and researchers.
Meta’s decision to bring social features to children’s accounts on Quest comes as Congress is putting increased pressure on social media companies like Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat to protect children on their platforms.
Pok Pok, a kids app maker focused on building play-based learning experiences for the preschool set, has made a name for itself in the iOS developer community after winning both an App Store award for cultural impact and an Apple Design Award. But now the company is ready to expand its reach by bringing its app and new STEM-based activities to families with both iOS and Android devices, thanks to its latest funding.
The app, Pok Pok Playroom, today offers seventeen different play experiences that are more akin to “digital toys” than games, as they allow kids to explore with creative play. There are “toys” that respond to touches, drawing tools, those for interacting with shapes, dress-up toys, dinosaur toys, and much more.
Originally incubated inside Snowman, the studio behind award-winning iOS games like Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Skate City, and others, the idea for Pok Pok emerged from the company’s culture of tinkering.
Snowman employees Mathijs Demaeght and Esther Huybreghts, now Pok Pok VP of Design and Chief Creative Officer, respectively, were looking for an app to entertain their young son James when he was a toddler. However, the co-founders didn’t find many options they liked. They wanted something playful, but not too technical and not gamified. After prototyping a product, they showed it to Snowman co-founder and creative director Ryan Cash, who saw the potential. Ryan’s sister, Melissa Cash, whose background was in developing products at Disney for babies and toddlers, joined the team and is now CEO of the Pok Pok spinout.
In the years since its May 2021 debut, Pok Pok has added new learning experiences to its app, raised a $3 million seed round, and reached six figures in terms of monthly recurring revenue. Over the past year, the business has grown by 5x and the subscriber base by 9x, though the startup isn’t yet ready to share hard numbers. The app itself has over a million downloads.
Image Credits: Pok Pok
The startup’s growth caught investors’ attention, leading to a $6 million Series A. The round was led by Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn, who has also backed other subscription businesses like Oura, Calm, Clue, and Blinkist. Also participating in the round were Konvoy Ventures, MetaLab Ventures, Banana Capital, and other angel investors, including Instacart’s Brandon Leonardo.
Though pleased to have raised an oversubscribed round, the team realized they didn’t have any women on their cap table, which made them uneasy, given that the women-led company builds products for families.
“That just didn’t sit right,” explains CEO Melissa Cash. “So we decided to make some allocation changes. We set aside some cash from the round. We did a first close because we didn’t want to hold up everything, but we took cash out and did a second close, which actually took us longer to raise than the first close because it was very tough to find female investors who participate at series A and beyond.”
The team found that a lot of the women-led VCs tended to be pre-seed or seed or those who were involved in funds, but weren’t the decision-makers and check writers.
“That nuance was pretty important to us. And then we would find a lot of wonderful angel investors, but they didn’t have the capital or the wealth, frankly, to be able to invest in a Series A because, obviously, there’s a minimum check size. So it was a really eye-opening experience,” says Cash. “We thought if there’s any company that can get female backing, it’s Pok Pok.”
The second close of the round took them longer than the first due to these challenges and includes investors like Michelle Kennedy from Peanut.
Another one of the new investors ended up being Pok Pok’s fractional CFO, Julie McGill, who’s also an LP in several bigger venture funds. Like Pok Pok’s team, she was frustrated by the trouble the company was having to find women to add to the cap table. McGill ended up starting a brand new fund, Julie Change Fund, just to invest in Pok Pok. The fund will now focus on bringing in wealthy individual women investing at the Series A stage and beyond.
“Pok Pok is the catalyst for starting a fund I have been thinking about for years—this fund is my commitment to breaking barriers women face in accessing, driving, and accumulating capital,” McGill said, in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with Pok Pok, a company that excels at driving capital efficient growth, led by two amazing women.”
With the additional funds, Pok Pok is going to expand its offerings to include more STEM-based activities, in response to parents’ requests for more traditional learning experiences in the app alongside the more playful ones. The new activities will still be targeted to the preschool crowd, though Pok Pok is aware that even younger and older users continue to use its app and designs accordingly.
The company will also be able to address demand for Android later this fall. Notes Cash, many families have Android tablets for their kids because of the more accessible price points.
“We want to make sure Pok Pok can be accessible to everybody. And we’ve had this waitlist growing for quite some time, so we have thousands of users…just waiting for it,” she says.
AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.
Announced in a post on the company’s official blog Friday, Anthropic will begin letting teens and preteens use third-party apps (but not its own apps, necessarily) powered by its AI models so long as the developers of those apps implement specific safety features and disclose to users which Anthropic technologies they’re leveraging.
In a support article, Anthropic lists several safety measures devs creating AI-powered apps for minors should include, like age verification systems, content moderation and filtering and educational resources on “safe and responsible” AI use for minors. The company also says that it may make available “technical measures” intended to tailor AI product experiences for minors, like a “child-safety system prompt” that developers targeting minors would be required to implement.
Devs using Anthropic’s AI models will also have to comply with “applicable” child safety and data privacy regulations such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the U.S. federal law that protects the online privacy of children under 13. Anthropic says it plans to “periodically” audit apps for compliance, suspending or terminating the accounts of those who repeatedly violate the compliance requirement, and mandate that developers “clearly state” on public-facing sites or documentation that they’re in compliance.
“There are certain use cases where AI tools can offer significant benefits to younger users, such as test preparation or tutoring support,” Anthropic writes in the post. “With this in mind, our updated policy allows organizations to incorporate our API into their products for minors.”
Anthropic’s change in policy comes as kids and teens are increasingly turning to generative AI tools for help not only with schoolwork but personal issues, and as rival generative AI vendors — including Google and OpenAI — are exploring more use cases aimed at children. This year, OpenAI formed a new team to study child safety and announced a partnership with Common Sense Media to collaborate on kid-friendly AI guidelines. And Google made its chatbot Bard, since rebranded to Gemini, available to teens in English in selected regions.
According to a poll from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 29% of kids report having used generative AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to deal with anxiety or mental health issues, 22% for issues with friends and 16% for family conflicts.
Last summer, schools and colleges rushed to ban generative AI apps — in particular ChatGPT — over fears of plagiarism and misinformation. Since then, some have reversed their bans. But not all are convinced of generative AI’s potential for good, pointing to surveys like the U.K. Safer Internet Centre’s, which found that over half of kids (53%) report having seen people their age use generative AI in a negative way — for example creating believable false information or images used to upset someone (including pornographic deepfakes).
Calls for guidelines on kid usage of generative AI are growing.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) late last year pushed for governments to regulate the use of generative AI in education, including implementing age limits for users and guardrails on data protection and user privacy. “Generative AI can be a tremendous opportunity for human development, but it can also cause harm and prejudice,” Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general, said in a press release. “It cannot be integrated into education without public engagement and the necessary safeguards and regulations from governments.”
