Zoodles Raises $2.6 Million For Kid-Friendly Browser

Zoodles, a browser designed for kids, has raised $2.6 million in seed financing led by Harrison Metal Capital. The company is also officially launching its browser product today.

The brainchild of Mark Williamson, Zoodles aims to allows children to play and interact with the web through games, puzzles and videos. The inspiration for Zoodles came from Williamson’s four year old daughter, who was having trouble interacting with a mainstream browser. Zoodles is free for all but also offers a premium membership that allows parents the ability to customize and restrict their child’s online learning experience based on their age, interests, educational needs and skills.

The Zoodles interface is a personal playground for kids, which is series of games, puzzles and videos that are broken down by type on a page. And the interface is customized to a user’s age, so a 5-year-old may get a different screen as a 3-year-old. Content is aggregated from kid-friendly sites across the web. The browser also includes large tabs, mouse controls adapted to small hands and an interface that doesn’t require reading skills.

Through a Premium Membership, Zoodles allows parents to customize the browser by shaping the content and subjects (i.e. focusing games on up the math and science), setting play time limits, blocking specific branded characters or sites, and setting other preferences. The Premium Membership also includes ad blocking functionality. And Zoodles keeps parents up-to-date on their child’s activities
through frequent email progress reports.

Of course, Zoodles isn’t the first kid-friendly browser on the market. KidZui has a similar product and has scored a number of high-profile partnerships with corporations like Best Buy, Comcast and DreamWorks.

Crunchbase

• ZOODLES

Company: Zoodles

Website: zoodles.com

Launch Date: 2008

Funding: $2.6M

Zoodles is a safe online service that makes learning fun for young children! The idea for Zoodles was born while Mark watched his 4-year-old daughter, Abbie, struggle while using the computer. He wondered why kids were constantly trying to adapt to computers rather than having the computers adapt to them. After talking with dozens of other parents, it became clear that they were all equally frustrated with the experiences their children were having online. While parents universally believed that the computer...

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