Securly CEO Uses Artificial Intelligence to Keep Kids Safe Online
*By Tracey Cheek*
Securly is a start-up with a simple mission: to keep kids safe online. And the artificial intelligence company has just raised $16 million in series B funding to expand the reach of its social media tracking capabilities to more parents and schools.
“We are going to take this money and invest in research and development and scaling up sales and distribution across America,” CEO and co-founder Vinay Mahadik told Cheddar.
The funding round was led by Defy Partners with participation by Owl Ventures. The infusion brought Securly’s total venture capital raised to date to $24 million.
Securly looks for online signs of cyberbullying, self-harm, and other digital threats both at school and at home. It currently has over 500,000 parents on its parent portal and serves more than 7 million total students and over 5,000 schools. It has a market penetration of over 10 percent of U.S. public school districts.
While big digital players like Facebook's ($FB) Instagram and Google ($GOOGL) have implemented their own tools for blocking unsafe content from kids, Mahadik says there is little evidence of adoption by parents.
“What we have seen over the past five years is schools and parents don't have the time to try and use all the solutions by each of the different giants out there,” Mahadik said. “Google, Microsoft ($MSFT), Apple ($APPL) all came out with their own solutions and we have not seen any evidence that parents actually using these solutions together in a typical household.”
With products both for school and home, Mahadik said Securly can offer a unified solution keep kids safe throughout their day.
"That's allowed the company to be a five-year-old startup competing with 20-year-old incumbents and still be extremely successful," he said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/securly-using-artificial-intelligence-to-keep-kids-safe-online).
Aya Kantorovich, Co-CEO of August Digital, breaks down Bitcoin’s surge, crypto ETFs, institutional investment trends, and the future of safer crypto access.
Most members of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting committee supported further reductions to its key interest rate this year, minutes from last month’s meeting showed.
Sinead O’Sullivan breaks down Taylor Swift’s genius marketing for The Life of a Showgirl, which just set the record for most albums sold in a single week.
Markets are emerging from a turbulent Q3. Horizon’s Mike Dickson shares insights on interest rates, small caps, and where investors should look in Q4 and beyond
Bambu Ventures's Kyle Pretsch dives into Lemonaid’s $10M buyout, down from 23andMe’s $400M price tag, and what’s next after Chrome Co.’s dramatic pivot.
Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology in artificial intelligence. Chambers is trying take some of the lessons he learned while riding a wave that turned Cisco into the world's most valuable company in 2000 before a crash hammered its stock price and apply them as an investor in AI startups. He recently discussed AI's promise and perils during an interview with The Associated Press.
Grove Collaborative’s CEO shares how the company is reinventing everyday goods with sustainability at the core and working toward a plastic-free future.
