For the third time in nine months, kids gaming safety and privacy startup k-ID has raised new funding—a $45 million Series A led by Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz.
The latest deal brings the total amount raised by the Singapore-based company to $51 million. Gaming VC Konvoy and identity verification company Okta also participated in the round. The gaming specialist raised a $5.4 million pre-seed and seed round in March. The company did not provide a valuation.
Company founder Kieran Donovan, a former privacy lawyer-turned-CEO, said the confluence of safety concerns, the patchwork of new regulations and the continued growth of gaming among young people made it an ideal time to launch.
“The kids issues [have] become super prominent and there was this perfect storm. We’d be pitching and we’d walk into a room and people had read about it, and they would say, ‘I am a parent, I get this,’ ” Donovan said.
The Series A comes after the US surgeon general announced he would push for warning labels on social media platforms about potentially damaging effects to adolescents. Several new children’s privacy regulations have been proposed in the US by the Federal Trade Commission and US Senate, though no action has taken place to implement them, leaving it to various states.
Donovan’s startup offers a development platform for game makers. Plugging directly into a game, the software moderates content based on a user’s location, such as disabling targeted advertising. The user’s age is determined by various signals, bringing in third-party data, but it doesn’t collect and save birth dates.
Donovan pointed out that in the game development space, many countries even differ on the definition of a child. “In Korea, anyone under the age of 14 is a child. In Australia, it’s under the age of 15. In a lot of European states, it’s under the age of 16. In various parts of Southeast Asia, it’s 20 or 21—in parts of the Middle East, it’s 7.”
The development segment has been pushing the gaming vertical forward, according to PitchBook data. Generating $542.1 million in funding across 41 deals in Q1 2024, the segment has outpaced all others within the space and has been on an incline for the past three quarters.
Some recent funding rounds include Kaedim, a 3D generative modeling startup for the games industry raising a $15 million Series A in March, and Astrocade, an AI games specialist raising a $12 million seed round in June.
Donovan said he sees a future for k-ID beyond just gaming, with potential integration into social media platforms. He said the continuous patchwork of laws sets the stage for future growth.
“The challenge is feeling like you’re trying to stay on top of the wave as things are building and building,” he said. “But this is definitely the challenge everybody needs to solve.”
Featured image by Carlos Ruben Hernandez Blasco/Getty Images
Learn more about our editorial standards.
