SuperAwesome, a startup which is five years old, has been tapping into the growing need for kid-friendly technology, including kid-safe advertising, social engagement tools, authentication and parental controls. Its client list includes Activision, Hasbro, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Spin Master, Nintendo, Bandai, WB, Moose Toys and many more.
The company has just booked its first profit quarter. It reached profitability for the first time in Q4 2017, and has a booked revenue run-rate of $28 million, after seeing 70 percent growth year-over-year. This year, it expects to grow 100 percent, with a revenue run rate of $50 million.
The company says the shift to digital is driving its growth, as TV viewing is dropping at 10 to 20 percent per year, while kids’ digital budgets are growing at 25 percent year over year. At the same time, the kids brand and content owners are realizing that safety and privacy have to be a part of their web and mobile experiences.
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The technology used by them isn’t consumer-facing. It powers the apps and websites that today’s kids use. For example Mattel’s Barbie Fashion Closet or Monster High, Hasbro’s My Little Pony or a website from kids’ author Roald Dahl, to name a few.
Key to all these experiences is a technology platform that allows developers to build kid-safe apps and sites. That includes products like AwesomeAds, which ensures ads in the kids’ space aren’t tracking personal data and the ads are kid-appropriate.
The company’s 120-person staff also includes a full-time moderation team to review content before it goes public. “The content created on [SuperAwesome’s] platform goes through two layers of moderation. It goes through our machine learning moderation. Then it goes through our 24/7 team of human moderators as well,” explains the company’s executives. “With the kids’ audience, it doesn’t work to completely automate all this — you have to have human involvement.”
SuperAwesome believes it’s now poised for rapid growth as more brands and businesses begin to address the needs of keeping kids safe online.
“Kidtech, as a category, has really just been invented in the past three or four years. No one thought they’d have to build specific technology for kids…this is problem that we’re starting to solve,” the company’s representatives said.