Child Online Safety Cohort Graduates from UNICEF's Venture Fund
Female-led startups making innovation impact using AI-powered solutions that ensure children are safe online
Globally, the risk of young people developing mental health problems has risen to unprecedented levels. The availability of meaningful, safe, and evidence-informed solutions that deliver low-cost interventions for mental health and psychosocial support services remains challenging, and existing solutions addressing the issue are not scaling at the pace required to meet the growing need.
As children and their families are increasingly turning to digital solutions to support with learning, social interaction and play in the post-pandemic reality, there is an opportunity to leverage digital technologies to support young people in accessing the care they need.
In February, UNICEF’s Venture Fund onboarded two female-led companies that are developing Open Source, AI-powered solutions to address digital risks to children in collaboration with the Safe Online Initiative.
Tilli (Sri Lanka) is a game-based, AI-powered, social-emotional learning tool and Talk2U (Brazil) is a digital therapeutics platform that improves social, emotional, and mental wellbeing among young people. Both companies graduated in mid-2023, and their presence has increased female leadership in the Fund to over 40%.
Throughout the investment period, both companies received more than 100 hours of mentorship and were connected to UNICEF’s vast networks in-country. They had access to one-to-one mentoring from subject matter experts in Open Source development, software development, business strategy, the generation of evidence of impact and results, programmatic specific expertise, and data security and privacy among other things.
We had such an incredible time with the UNICEF Venture Fund. As an early-stage company, the Fund was our first investor and we couldn't have asked for a better partner to start this journey. What we valued the most was the 1:1 support and guidance and the meaningful introductions made through UNICEF's extensive network. As an impact-focused start-up, this is the exact kind of investment coupled with personalized support we needed.
In the year and a half since we began collaborating with this cohort, we've seen first-hand how startups benefit from the year-long technical assistance programme.
The cohort has shown tremendous progress in terms of identifying and testing their product/market fit and ensuring their ability to scale. As a result of the UNICEF investment, Tilli has created an extraordinary user experience by improving the appeal and gamification of their product for children and Talk2U has been testing the effectiveness of their chat interventions through rigorous research methods.
Strategic investments of time and resources by the Venture Fund have enabled the companies to grow their beneficiary reach and develop notable partnerships with organizations such as Save the Children Sri Lanka, National Geographic, Disney, Dove, the University of Oxford, and Open Society Foundations. Combined, Tilli and Talk2U have raised over $425k in follow-on funding and have already generated over $51k in revenue, showcasing the potential for promising investment opportunities in the mental health space.
The UNICEF Venture Fund proudly celebrates the remarkable achievements of two female-led graduates in a short span. Navigating the challenges of monetizing child-focused products, developing Open Source technologies, and scaling across diverse contexts in the mental health space is no easy feat. However, the successful partnership between the Venture Fund, Tilli, and Talk2U demonstrates that it is possible.
To discover more about partnering with the Venture Fund's Child Online Safety Cohort, contact us at venturefund@unicef.org.
Tilli (Sri Lanka): Game-based, AI-powered social-emotional learning tool
- Developed an AI-powered social-emotional learning tool with 80% completion rate
- Over 90% of learners reporting successful integration of learnings with everyday problem solving
- 6,000+ learners have benefited from the solution to date
- Collaboration with Save the Children Sri Lanka reached over 3,000 families
- 19 Elementary Schools using Tilli in Sri Lanka
- Used by two government agencies - National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) and Department of Probation and Child Services / Trained 80+ case workers/probation officers in leveraging the Tilli learning suite.
Interested in supporting Tilli's growth and impact? Here are their needs for further growth and opportunities to scale:
- Pre-seed and EdTech/mental health funders to join/lead their pre-seed round in raising $1.5M for three key areas:
- Expanding Tilli’s Gen-AI powered learning suite to build, map, and measure 8 essential cognitive skills from self awareness to emotional resilience.
- Build engineering and product capacity especially in the fields of machine learning and data and learning sciences.
- Scaling to 100 elementary schools
- Connections with elementary schools, INGOs, and education ministries to support their short-term goal of scaling to 100 schools.
Read more on Tilli’s year-long journey with the Fund here.
Talk2U (Brazil): Digital therapeutics platform to improve social, emotional, and mental wellbeing
- Launched the “Como Se Eu Fosse” WhatsApp chatbot to combat online hate speech, reaching over 500 participants
- 85% of users found the experience to be valuable to learn about hate speech and deal with its impact.
- Reached over 2 million beneficiaries to date across 8 conversational journeys (example topics include, Mental Health, HIV, and more)
Interested in supporting Talk2U’s growth and impact? Here are their needs for further growth and opportunities to scale:
- Funding to support app development, B2C business model development, and efficacy trials.
- Individuals and organizations collaborating on the SDGs that can sponsor new content to expand impact, running cultural and language adaptations to existing journeys within new regions, and researching new target audiences to map new journeys needed.
Read more on Talk2U’s year-long journey with the Fund here.
Insights from the Cohort
As the Venture Fund successfully graduates this cohort, we have packaged some of our learnings and reflections to date from working with these companies.
Our reflections from the first half of the investment period are consistent:
- One of the main struggles that early-stage startups encounter is attracting and retaining talent. Local conditions, such as ongoing crises in the country, can aggravate this. We've seen the need for companies to invest in bringing onboard relevant talent, pivot fast when facing staffing issues, and focus on core projects that bring the highest value add to the company when going through these transitionary periods.
- Firsthand introductions often result in the highest potential for new partnerships. We are grateful to the -Safe Online team for all the relevant connections they have made for this cohort to date.
- Cohort/Cross-cohort collaborations continue to generate promising results. Talk2U’s partnership with Venture Fund alumni company Weni, which involves Weni providing Open Source Technology specifically around platform flows and a data dashboard, has further shown the value and benefits of these collaborations. While also showcasing the value of existing open-source technologies.
- Open Source games have a different landscape to navigate than that of traditional Open Source software. The Open Source movement in the gaming community is still at an earlier stage than in other verticals; and with that comes implications, such as cultural differences between open and proprietary game development, and a smaller talent pool available to work with Open Source game development tools.
- Working smarter, not harder. This cohort has underlined that it is essential to streamline time-consuming, repetitive processes and find ways to automate and templatize, when possible. Whether that be in content creation processes, development, etc.
We've also gained new insights during the second half of the investment period:
- The online safety ecosystem has expressed a requirement for rigorous evidence of impact to be provided in-line with these solutions and there is proven value for the companies to invest in this evidence generation.
- Monetizing child-focused products can be challenging, and finding investors that are willing to invest in the sector requires perseverance, as the types of business models (ie B2G) might be less desirable to some investors. It is a necessity for the companies to have patience and to find the right fit with investors, with aligned goals and expectations. For example, when speaking with traditional ed-tech investors there may be unrealistic expectations for a higher traction than these companies are generating to date.
- Having a well-defined Theory of Change is hugely beneficial for the companies and enables not only internal alignment for the objective of the product, but also clearer storytelling for external audiences and strategic business opportunities.
- Companies new to Open Source struggle with the idea of releasing their intellectual property (code, content) to the public without a tangible return (USD). It is important for the companies to remember that their expertise/experience is one of their most valuable assets.
