In September 2020, Claret’s portfolio company, SuperAwesome, was acquired by Epic Games to make the internet safer for children. We’re proud to have helped grow this business and asked Dylan to share with you how it all started.. and how it’s going.
Where did the idea behind SuperAwesome stem from?
SuperAwesome was founded as we saw the dual emerging trends of an increasing children’s digital audience with the resulting digital privacy laws. However, the internet was never designed for kids and that entire audience had historically been a cognitive blind spot for much of Silicon Valley. We realised this created the opportunity to build the software stack for the kids’ audience, tools enabling engagement built specifically to also ensure their digital privacy and safety.
Who is your customer?
We provide kidtech products to all stakeholders in the kids’ digital ecosystem including creators, brands, content owners, developers and agencies. The products enable varying types of engagement with kids (u13) and young teens (u16), which comply with privacy laws like COPPA (US), GDPR-K (Europe) and AADC (UK).
What is your competitive advantage?
We are the biggest team in the world (~200 people) focused on building kidtech solutions. Our platform is trusted by hundreds of brands and thousands of creators and developers, delivering over 12.5B kid-safe transactions every month. We have unique scale and experience in this sector, coupled with customer trust.
How did SuperAwesome adapt to COVID-19 working?
The global team (US, UK, Europe) shifted to work from home over two weeks and it’s worked brilliantly (thanks to our Office Ops and People teams). School shutdown led to a near-doubling of children’s digital screen time, so it accelerated a lot of industry trends which had been driving our growth.
What’s next?
SuperAwesome was acquired by Epic Games in Sept 2020 and we’re incredibly excited by this next chapter. It gives us an amazing opportunity to accelerate our mission to make the internet safer for kids.