k-ID raises $45M to make online games safer and more private for all (2024)

k-ID has raised $45 million to make online games safer and offer privacy management for game developers, parents, kids, teens — and just all players.

The Singapore company is creating a cross-platform, single sign-on solution for kids and teens built as an all-in-one answer for solving the complex issue of privacy and online safety worldwide.

The funding is sizable in part because the company said it has unprecedented traction from major game publishers. The Series A round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with major support from Konvoy, Tirta, the world’s leading identity management platform Okta, and Z Venture Capital from the Japanese tech leader LY Corporation. This brings the total funding raised to date to $51 million — with three rounds raised in less than nine months.

In addition, k-ID was recently selected as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer for 2024, joining the ranks of esteemed alumni, including Google and Airbnb in their early stages. Only 100 companies make the WEF Technology Pioneers cohort each year based on their potential to transform industries and society.

Game publishers integrating k-ID represent games and online experiences played by hundreds of millions of kids and teens each day around the world, including popular experiences from some of the world’s largest public and private gaming companies.

“The time for change is now — today, the world demands safer, more empowered online experiences for youth,” said Kieran Donovan, CEO of k-ID, in a statement. “The groundswell of support from across the
industry has been phenomenal. We are excited to accelerate our mission to bring privacy-preserving, youth-first technology that delivers on the societal imperative of empowering the next generation.”

I asked Donovan what the company does. He said in an email that if you’re a developer who has built a game, app or service where part of the audience might be kids or teens, the system takes care of the regulatory complexity that comes with appealing to that audience.

“Today, a developer would need to spend millions on lawyers and advisors around the world to uncover what changes they need to make to their service for kids, and then they need to program separate onboarding processes, parent tooling, change the way dozens of features like chat and spending work, and much more,” Donovan said.

k-ID takes care of that challenge. A developer signs up, indicates which markets they want to launch in, selects their features, and then generates an API key. Once that API key is integrated, the system takes care of how the onboarding process needs to work for kids in each country (e.g., the age threshold adapts to anywhere from 7 to 21, as the age of a child differs across 128 countries), the parent experience, whether features are on or need a parent to unlock them, even how parents and their kids interact so that it becomes a more meaningful connection around a particular game or service.

“What we hope is that it relegates the ‘I confirm I am over 13’ pop-up to history — giving developers the opportunity to unlock a genuine experience for kids, especially in cases where kids have no choice today but to lie about their age,” he said.

Donovan said his own childhood trauma was the motivation for k-ID. In an email to GamesBeat, Donovan said, “I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. What I can share is that it persisted for a number of years when I was a child, although it wasn’t until I had a son of my own that the true horror of the experience crystallised for me. After battling those mental demons for a few years and watching my son start to grow up I felt compelled to speak up.”

He added, “I reported it to law enforcement and a few days later he was arrested. Once it hit the press I read about many others coming forward. I testified at trial several years later. After a nearly 3 month trial the jury was dismissed due to misconduct, and the process began again. Fortunately he was convicted on all counts after the second trial and he was handed one of the longest prison sentences ever for a convicted child sex offender.”

“Kids today make friends and countless memories inside games and virtual worlds, and parents need modern tools to keep them safe,” said Jonathan Lai, General Partner at a16z. “k-ID is serving this need and defining a new industry standard for digital youth safety. We first invested in k-ID at the pre-seed through Speedrun, and we’re thrilled to continue supporting them as they make digital communities safer for kids and parents.”

Furthering its affiliation and support within the industry, k-ID also announced today a partnership with the ESRB Privacy Certified program. k-ID has configured its parent/family and developer portals to reflect the program’s COPPA-based requirements. This partnership offers game publishers a way to leverage k-ID technology to help obtain the ESRB Privacy Certified Kids Seal.

“It’s rare to find this combination of unique founder-market fit, societal impact, and — most impressively — commercial traction,” said Moritz Baier-Lentz, partner and head of gaming & interactive media at Lightspeed, who is joining the company’s board of directors, in a statement. “Clearly, k-ID is solving a massive challenge for publishers, parents, teens, and kids worldwide. Embarking on this partnership during my parental leave only made it more meaningful.”

Donovan, Timothy Ma, Julian Corbett and Jeff Wu founded the company with a mission centered on youth empowerment. The k-ID team hails from the likes of Meta, Tencent, Google, Take-Two, EA, with deep expertise in games, legal compliance and trust and safety. The company, which emerged from stealth in March 2024, is rapidly establishing itself as one of the most promising and fastest-growing start-ups in the world.

“There are over two billion people aged 18 and under, and their increasingly expansive digital identity needs to be secure,” said Austin Arensberg, senior director at Okta Ventures, in a statement. “Kids have unique authentication and authorization requirements, and k-ID has a robust and novel approach to ensuring safe online digital access to games and other digital assets. We are incredibly impressed by the team and excited for what lies ahead.”

“Publishers are navigating new challenges with growing their user base under the age of 18 and complicated global compliance standards. We believe k-ID’s innovative solutions will streamline the challenges posed by the ever-changing regulatory landscape and pave the way for a safer online environment for our kids and teens,” said Hyung Kim from Z Venture Capital, the corporate venture arm of LY corporation (a merged entity of LINE and Yahoo Japan), in a statement.

Pioneering new thinking around kids and online gaming, k-ID will attend the prestigious Summer Davos (the 15th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting) in China and speak at the Games for Change Festival (the premier event for social impact gaming) in New York – both taking place at the end of June.

The company has 40 employees and it was founded in 2022 in Singapore.

As for why the company raised money so fast, Donovan said in an email to GamesBeat, “The traction that we saw was much faster than we anticipated. We signed our first triple-A publisher within 72 hours of our first very pitch and from then on the momentum has been humbling. It was mostly excitement from investors given the traction, so we experienced a lot of inbound — however as we continued to sign deals with publishers we also saw opportunities to bring forward many of the features we had on the roadmap for a year or two years from now.”

He said the company will be announcing a range of triple-A titles over the course of this year, and will announce together with the Series A that the first public title is the world’s most popular VR game, Gorilla Tag.

“We have more than a dozen publishers working through integrations today, covering many of the world’s top titles. Our first live games will hit the world in the summer. We will be launching a suite of exciting tools for developers later this year to make it even easier to integrate and get games in the hands of kids and teens in an empowering way,” Donovan said.

As for what the company will use the new round for, he said, “We have been humbled by the traction so far — and having built this foundation have been asked to build a lot on top of this infrastructure. Our north star is to build new features that bridge the gap between and connect parents with their kids, all of whom are digital natives at such a young age. We want parents to feel truly engaged in the communities their child builds online, and for kids to know that they finally have a way to get into the worlds they want, without friction, and in a way that respects them for who they are rather than blocking them out.”

As for early results, Donovan said, “One thing I take the time to do every week is at least one full demo of the experience for someone who has never seen it before. Many of the publishers or partners we speak to are themselves parents, having experienced lengthy and frustrating onboarding experiences (and many have admitted to giving up and entering their own birth date), and even then having little idea what their kids are doing online. Showing them for the first time the simplicity, elegance and magic of k-ID and hearing the words “of course this is how it should be!” tells me we’ve built something that strikes a human chord.”

I asked who the competitors are.

He said the challenge is so complex (200 countries multiplied by thousands of intersecting laws and guidance) that to his knowledge k-ID is the first to attempt to build a system of this size and sophistication — yet with the user experience front and center, rather than the regulatory complexity.

“What we hear from parents is that they tend to feel like family tools are an after-thought, with a handful of common toggles. They tell us that their experience is that there isn’t a lot to actually help that parent better connect with their kids, it’s very simple. We are constantly innovating on what we can do to actually take that connection and build on it,” he said.