*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).
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